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Michele Spagnuolo

Michele Spagnuolo

Michele Spagnuolo is a Staff Information Security Engineer at Google leading the Web Signals and Intelligence area in the Information Security team.

At Google, he built Security Signals, a comprehensive system providing security measurability for web services, deployed in a complex application ecosystem of thousands of web services handling traffic from billions of users. He is now leading an effort to define a common, domain-agnostic methodology for product security measurability across Alphabet.

Previously, he co-authored the CSP3 W3C specification, which now protects more than a third of the Internet's HTML traffic against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. He deployed CSP and other web security features at scale across Alphabet following a full-cycle, data-driven approach.

Other works include Rosetta Flash, a Pwnie Awards-nominated exploitation technique that abuses the Flash SWF format to bypass the Same Origin Policy and BitIodine, the first open source Bitcoin blockchain analysis framework, cited by around 450 academic publications.

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    Security Signals: Making Web Security Posture Measurable At Scale
    Michele Spagnuolo
    David Dworken
    Artur Janc
    Santiago (Sal) Díaz
    Lukas Weichselbaum
    (2024) (to appear)
    Preview abstract The area of security measurability is gaining increased attention, with a wide range of organizations calling for the development of scalable approaches for assessing the security of software systems and infrastructure. In this paper, we present our experience developing Security Signals, a comprehensive system providing security measurability for web services, deployed in a complex application ecosystem of thousands of web services handling traffic from billions of users. The system collects security-relevant information from production HTTP traffic at the reverse proxy layer, utilizing novel concepts such as synthetic signals augmented with additional risk information to provide a holistic view of the security posture of individual services and the broader application ecosystem. This approach to measurability has enabled large-scale security improvements to our services, including allowing prioritized rollouts of security enhancements and the implementation of automated regression monitoring; it has proven valuable for security research and prioritization of defensive work. Security Signals addresses shortcomings of prior web measurability proposals by tracking a comprehensive set of security properties relevant to web applications, and by extracting insights from collected data for use by both security experts and non-experts. We believe the lessons learned from the implementation and use of Security Signals offer valuable insights for practitioners responsible for web service security, potentially inspiring new approaches to web security measurability. View details
    CSP Is Dead, Long Live CSP! On the Insecurity of Whitelists and the Future of Content Security Policy
    Lukas Weichselbaum
    Michele Spagnuolo
    Sebastian Lekies
    Artur Janc
    Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM, Vienna, Austria (2016)
    Preview abstract Content Security Policy is a web platform mechanism designed to mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS), the top security vulnerability in modern web applications. In this paper, we take a closer look at the practical benefits of adopting CSP and identify significant flaws in real-world deployments that result in bypasses in 94.72% of all distinct policies. We base our Internet-wide analysis on a search engine corpus of approximately 100 billion pages from over 1 billion hostnames; the result covers CSP deployments on 1,680,867 hosts with 26,011 unique CSP policies – the most comprehensive study to date. We introduce the security-relevant aspects of the CSP specification and provide an in-depth analysis of its threat model, focusing on XSS protections. We identify three common classes of CSP bypasses and explain how they subvert the security of a policy. We then turn to a quantitative analysis of policies deployed on the Internet in order to understand their security benefits. We observe that 14 out of the 15 domains most commonly whitelisted for loading scripts contain unsafe endpoints; as a consequence, 75.81% of distinct policies use script whitelists that allow attackers to bypass CSP. In total, we find that 94.68% of policies that attempt to limit script execution are ineffective, and that 99.34% of hosts with CSP use policies that offer no benefit against XSS. Finally, we propose the ’strict-dynamic’ keyword, an addition to the specification that facilitates the creation of policies based on cryptographic nonces, without relying on domain whitelists. We discuss our experience deploying such a nonce-based policy in a complex application and provide guidance to web authors for improving their policies. View details
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