Biblio

Cross-Site scripting (XSS) is a common class of vulnerabilities in the domain of web applications. As it re-mains prevalent despite continued efforts by practitioners and researchers, site operators often seek to protect their assets using web application firewalls (WAFs). These systems employ filtering mechanisms to intercept and reject requests that may be suitable to exploit XSS flaws and related vulnerabilities such as SQL injections. However, they generally do not offer complete protection and can often be bypassed using specifically crafted exploits. In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of WAFs to detect XSS exploits. We develop an attack grammar and use a combinatorial testing approach to generate attack vectors. We compare our vectors with conventional counterparts and their ability to bypass different WAFs. Our results show that the vectors generated with combinatorial testing perform equal or better in almost all cases. They further confirm that most of the rule sets evaluated in this work can be bypassed by at least one of these crafted inputs.

In this paper, we present a combinatorial testing methodology for automated black-box security testing of complex web applications. The focus of our work is the identification of Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. We introduce a new modelling scheme for test case generation of XSS attack vectors consisting of locally optimized attack models. The modelling approach takes into account the response and behavior of the web application and is particularly efficient when used in conjunction with combinatorial testing. In addition to the modelling scheme, we present a research prototype of a security testing tool called XSSInjector, which executes attack vectors generated from our methodology against web applications. The tool also employs a newly developed test oracle for detecting XSS which allow us to precisely identify whether injected JavaScript is actually executed and thus eliminate false positives. Our testing methodology is sufficiently generic to be applied to any web application that returns HTML code. We describe the foundations of our approach and validate it via an extensive case study using a verification framework and real world web applications. In particular, we have found several new critical vulnerabilities in popular forum software, library management systems and gallery packages.

In this paper, we present a combinatorial testing methodology for testing web applications in regards to SQL injection vulnerabilities. We describe three attack grammars that were developed and used to generate concrete attack vectors. Furthermore, we present and evaluate two different oracles used to observe the application's behavior when subjected to such attack vectors. We also present a prototype tool called SQLInjector capable of automated SQL injection vulnerability testing for web applications. The developed methodology can be applied to any web application that uses server side scripting and HTML for handling user input and has a SQL database backend. Our approach relies on the use of a database proxy, making this a gray-box testing method. We establish the effectiveness of the proposed tool with the WAVSEP verification framework and conduct a case study on real-world web applications, where we are able to discover both known vulnerabilities and additional previously undiscovered flaws.