Angry birding: evaluating application exceptions as attack canaries

Application exceptions are anomalous events occurring within the application. These can be caused by common issues such as simple programming errors; however, they can also originate from the side-effects of a trial-and-error process used in active attacks. Utilising attacker-induced exceptions as a canary for intrusion detection has been demonstrated as a feasible technique for SQL injection detection, but this has not been applied to other types of attacks. This paper proposes an approach to consider attacker-induced application exceptions as attack canaries. The work is part of an ongoing investigation on integrating detective defences into applications through established development practices.