In brief

  • Today’s highlights feature advancements in automated vulnerability discovery for web applications and browser architecture.
  • We cover a new approach that combines developer annotations with dynamic analysis to find business logic flaws, and an automated framework for uncovering site isolation bypasses in modern browsers.

Anota: Identifying Business Logic Vulnerabilities via Annotation-Based Sanitization

  • Introduces Anota, a framework that leverages lightweight developer annotations combined with dynamic fuzzing to uncover business logic vulnerabilities that evade traditional scanners.
  • Extends the memory-safety sanitizer model to application logic, allowing developers to define custom sources, sinks, and access rules directly in the code, which Anota then tracks at runtime using an instrumented interpreter.
  • Evaluated against standard vulnerable benchmarks and out-performed existing static and dynamic scanners, reporting all 35 in-scope vulnerabilities with zero false positives during a 24-hour fuzzing trial.

Wang, M., Görz, P., Schilling, J., Hassler, K., Guo, L., Holz, T., Abbasi, A. “Anota: Identifying Business Logic Vulnerabilities via Annotation-Based Sanitization.” NDSS 2026. https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/anota-identifying-business-logic-vulnerabilities-via-annotation-based-sanitization/

Are your Sites Truly Isolated? Automatically Detecting Logic Bugs in Site Isolation Implementations

  • Examines the implementation flaws in browser Site Isolation mechanisms, which aim to confine separate web origins to distinct renderer processes.
  • Proposes an automated fuzzing framework specifically targeting the Inter-Process Communication (IPC) boundary between the compromised renderer and the privileged browser process to detect logic bugs that allow origins to bypass isolation.
  • Discovered multiple logic bugs in Chrome and Firefox that enable an attacker to spoof origins, access cross-site data, or interact with privileged APIs, demonstrating the fragility of current Site Isolation implementations.
BrowserBug ClassExample Attack Surface
ChromeOrigin ConfusionSpoofing origin during filesystem URL creation
ChromeMissing ChecksAccessing IndexedDB or Blob URLs across origins
FirefoxChecks BypassedForging notifications or setting arbitrary document URIs

Drescher, J., Klein, D., Johns, M. “Are your Sites Truly Isolated? Automatically Detecting Logic Bugs in Site Isolation Implementations.” NDSS 2026. https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/are-your-sites-truly-isolated-automatically-detecting-logic-bugs-in-site-isolation-implementations/