A Method to Enhance the Security Capability of Python IDE

Abstract

The majority of applications running on the Internet are web applications; however, these applications are vulnerable to arbitrary code execution and database manipulation by Cross-Site Scripting or SQL injection attacks. The fundamental reason of these vulnerabilities is that web applications use a string type for assembling heterogeneous computer languages’ syntax for a particular language. To cope with these vulnerabilities, we propose a language-based scheme, in which the programming language itself provides security capabilities by a method of the syntax embedded in Python. Furthermore, the proposed solution supports backward compatibility and higher portability to other languages as well as Python. To improve the debugging difficulty caused by a language-based scheme, we propose a trace-processor that has post-mortem debug ability. We implement the proposed solution as a development environment, named Python-S, based on CPython’s source code. Python-S successfully displays the protection capabilities for the SQL injection attack.