Biblio

Nowadays, safety is a first-rate subject for all applications. There has been an exponential growth year by year in the number of businesses going digital since the few decades following the birth of the Internet. In these technologically advanced times, cyber security is a must mainly for internet applications, so we have the notion of diving deeper into the Cyber security domain and are determined to make a complete project. We aim to develop a website portal for ease of communication between us and the end user. Utilizing the power of python scripting and flask server to make independent automated tools for detection of SQLI, XSS & a Spider(Content Discovery Tool). We have also integrated skipfish as a website vulnerability scanner to our project using python and Kali Linux. Since conducting a penetration test on another website without permission is not legal, we thought of building a dummy website prone to OS Command Injection in addition to the above-mentioned attacks. A well-documented report will be generated after the penetration test/ vulnerability scan. In case the website is vulnerable, patching of the website will be done with the user's consent.

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.

E-commerce, ticket booking, banking, and other web-based applications that deal with sensitive information, such as passwords, payment information, and financial information, are widespread. Some web developers may have different levels of understanding about securing an online application. The two vulnerabilities identified by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) for its 2017 Top Ten List are SQL injection and Cross-site Scripting (XSS). Because of these two vulnerabilities, an attacker can take advantage of these flaws and launch harmful web-based actions. Many published articles concentrated on a binary classification for these attacks. This article developed a new approach for detecting SQL injection and XSS attacks using deep learning. SQL injection and XSS payloads datasets are combined into a single dataset. The word-embedding technique is utilized to convert the word’s text into a vector. Our model used BiLSTM to auto feature extraction, training, and testing the payloads dataset. BiLSTM classified the payloads into three classes: XSS, SQL injection attacks, and normal. The results showed great results in classifying payloads into three classes: XSS attacks, injection attacks, and non-malicious payloads. BiLSTM showed high performance reached 99.26% in terms of accuracy.

In our proposed work the web security has been enhanced using additional security code and an enhanced frame work. Administrator of site is required to specify the security code for particular date and time. On user end user would be capable to login and view authentic code allotted to them during particular time slot. This work would be better in comparison of tradition researches in order to prevent sql injection attack and cross script because proposed work is not just considering the security, it is also focusing on the performance of security system. This system is considering the lot of security dimensions. But in previous system there was focus either on sql injection or cross script. Proposed research is providing versatile security and is available with low time consumption with less probability of unauthentic access.

In accordance to the annual report by the Cisco 2018, web applications are exposed to several security vulnerabilities that are exploited by hackers in various ways. It is becoming more and more frequent, specific and sophisticated. Of all the vulnerabilities, more than 40% of attempts are performed via cross-site scripting (XSS). A number of methods have been postulated to examine such vulnerabilities. Therefore, this paper attempted to address an overview of one such vulnerability: the cookies in the XSS. The objective is to present an overview of the cookies, it's type, vulnerability, policies, discovering, protecting and their mitigation via different tools/methods and via cryptography, artificial intelligence techniques etc. While some future issues, directions, challenges and future research challenges were also being discussed.

The presence of software vulnerabilities is a serious threat to any software project. Exploiting them can compromise system availability, data integrity, and confidentiality. Unfortunately, many open source projects go for years with undetected ready-to-exploit critical vulnerabilities. In this study, we investigate the presence of software vulnerabilities in open source projects and the factors that influence this presence. We analyzed the top 100 open source PHP applications in GitHub using a static analysis vulnerability scanner to examine how common software vulnerabilities are. We also discussed which vulnerabilities are most present and what factors contribute to their presence. We found that 27% of these projects are insecure, with a median number of 3 vulnerabilities per vulnerable project. We found that the most common type is injection vulnerabilities, which made 58% of all detected vulnerabilities. Out of these, cross-site scripting (XSS) was the most common and made 43.5% of all vulnerabilities found. Statistical analysis revealed that project activities like branching, pulling, and committing have a moderate positive correlation with the number of vulnerabilities in the project. Other factors like project popularity, number of releases, and number of issues had almost no influence on the number of vulnerabilities. We recommend that open source project owners should set secure code development guidelines for their project members and establish secure code reviews as part of the project's development process.

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.

QR codes are the means to offer more direct and instant access to information. However, QR codes have shown their deficiency, being a very powerful attack vector, for example, to execute phishing attacks. In this study, we have proposed a solution that allows controlling access to the information offered by QR codes. Through a scanner designed in APP Inventor which has been called XSStudent, a system has been built that analyzes the URLs obtained and compares them with a previously trained system. This study was executed by means of a controlled attack to the users of the university who through a flyer with a QR code and a fictional link accessed an infected page with JavaScript code that allowed a successful cross-site scripting attack. The results indicate that 100% of the users are vulnerable to this type of attacks, so also, with our proposal, an attack executed in the universities using the Beef software would be totally blocked.

Web applications are now considered one of the common platforms to represent data and conducting service releases throughout the World Wide Web. A number of the most commonly utilised frameworks for web applications are written in PHP. They became main targets because a vast number of servers are running these applications throughout the world. This increase in web application utilisation has made it more attractive to both users and hackers. According to the latest web security reports and research, cross site scripting (XSS) is the most popular vulnerability in PHP web application. XSS is considered an injection type of attack, which results in the theft of sensitive data, cookies, and sessions. Several tools and approaches have focused on detecting this kind of vulnerability in PHP source code. However, it is still a current problem in PHP web applications. This paper describes the popularity of PHP technology among other technologies, and highlight the approaches used to detect the most common vulnerabilities on PHP web applications, which is XSS. In addition, the discussion and the conclusion with future direction of research within this domain are highlighted.

In this paper, we present an overview of the problems associated with the cross-site scripting (XSS) in the graphical content of web applications. The brief analysis of vulnerabilities for graphical files and factors responsible for making SVG images vulnerable to XSS attacks are discussed. XML treatment methods and their practical testing are performed. As a result, the set of rules for protecting the graphic content of the websites and prevent XSS vulnerabilities are proposed.

While because the range of web users have increased exponentially, thus has the quantity of attacks that decide to use it for malicious functions. The vulnerability that has become usually exploited is thought as cross-site scripting (XSS). Cross-site Scripting (XSS) refers to client-side code injection attack whereby a malicious user will execute malicious scripts (also usually stated as a malicious payload) into a legitimate web site or web based application. XSS is amongst the foremost rampant of web based application vulnerabilities and happens once an internet based application makes use of un-validated or un-encoded user input at intervals the output it generates. In such instances, the victim is unaware that their data is being transferred from a website that he/she trusts to a different site controlled by the malicious user. In this paper we shall focus on type 1 or "non-persistent cross-site scripting". With non-persistent cross-site scripting, malicious code or script is embedded in a Web request, and then partially or entirely echoed (or "reflected") by the Web server without encoding or validation in the Web response. The malicious code or script is then executed in the client's Web browser which could lead to several negative outcomes, such as the theft of session data and accessing sensitive data within cookies. In order for this type of cross-site scripting to be successful, a malicious user must coerce a user into clicking a link that triggers the non-persistent cross-site scripting attack. This is usually done through an email that encourages the user to click on a provided malicious link, or to visit a web site that is fraught with malicious links. In this paper it will be discussed and elaborated as to how attack surfaces related to type 1 or "non-persistent cross-site scripting" attack shall be reduced using secure development life cycle practices and techniques.

Honeypots are servers or systems built to mimic critical parts of a network, distracting attackers while logging their information to develop attack profiles. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a honeypot disguised as a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API). We discuss the motivation for this work, design features of the honeypot, and experimental performance results under various traffic conditions. We also present analyses of both a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and a cross-site scripting (XSS) malware insertion attempt against this honeypot.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is an unremitting problem for the Web. Since its initial public documentation in 2000 until now, XSS has been continuously on top of the vulnerability statistics. Even though there has been a considerable amount of research and developer education to address XSS on the source code level, the overall number of discovered XSS problems remains high. Because of this, various approaches to mitigate XSS have been proposed as a second line of defense, with HTML sanitizers, Web Application Firewalls, browser-based XSS filters, and the Content Security Policy being some prominent examples. Most of these mechanisms focus on script tags and event handlers, either by removing them from user-provided content or by preventing their script code from executing. In this paper, we demonstrate that this approach is no longer sufficient for modern applications: We describe a novel Web attack that can circumvent all of theses currently existing XSS mitigation techniques. In this attack, the attacker abuses so called script gadgets (legitimate JavaScript fragments within an application's legitimate code base) to execute JavaScript. In most cases, these gadgets utilize DOM selectors to interact with elements in the Web document. Through an initial injection point, the attacker can inject benign-looking HTML elements which are ignored by these mitigation techniques but match the selector of the gadget. This way, the attacker can hijack the input of a gadget and cause processing of his input, which in turn leads to code execution of attacker-controlled values. We demonstrate that these gadgets are omnipresent in almost all modern JavaScript frameworks and present an empirical study showing the prevalence of script gadgets in productive code. As a result, we assume most mitigation techniques in web applications written today can be bypassed.

Access to computer systems and the information held on them, be it commercially or personally sensitive, is naturally, strictly controlled by both legal and technical security measures. One such method is digital identity, which is used to authenticate and authorize users to provide access to IT infrastructure to perform official, financial or sensitive operations within organisations. However, transmitting and sharing this sensitive information with other organisations over insecure channels always poses a significant security and privacy risk. An example of an effective solution to this problem is the Federated Identity Management (FIdM) standard adopted in the cloud environment. The FIdM standard is used to authenticate and authorize users across multiple organisations to obtain access to their networks and resources without transmitting sensitive information to other organisations. Using the same authentication and authorization details among multiple organisations in one federated group, it protects the identities and credentials of users in the group. This protection is a balance, mitigating security risk whilst maintaining a positive experience for users. Three of the most popular FIdM standards are Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Open Authentication (OAuth), and OpenID Connect (OIDC). This paper presents an assessment of these standards considering their architectural design, working, security strength and security vulnerability, to cognise and ascertain effective usages to protect digital identities and credentials. Firstly, it explains the architectural design and working of these standards. Secondly, it proposes several assessment criteria and compares functionalities of these standards based on the proposed criteria. Finally, it presents a comprehensive analysis of their security vulnerabilities to aid in selecting an apposite FIdM. This analysis of security vulnerabilities is of great significance because their improper or erroneous deployme- t may be exploited for attacks.

Software development and web applications have become fundamental in our lives. Millions of users access these applications to communicate, obtain information and perform transactions. However, these users are exposed to many risks; commonly due to the developer's lack of experience in security protocols. Although there are many researches about web security and hacking protection, there are plenty of vulnerable websites. This article focuses in analyzing 3 main hacking techniques: XSS, CSRF, and SQL Injection over a representative group of Colombian websites. Our goal is to obtain information about how Colombian companies and organizations give (or not) relevance to security; and how the final user could be affected.

Content Security Policy (CSP) is powerful client-side security layer that helps in mitigating and detecting wide ranges of Web attacks including cross-site scripting (XSS). However, utilizing CSP by site administrators is a fallible process and may require significant changes in web application code. In this paper, we propose an approach to help site administers to overcome these limitations in order to utilize the full benefits of CSP mechanism which leads to more immune sites from XSS. The algorithm is implemented as a plugin. It does not interfere with the Web application original code. The plugin can be “installed” on any other web application with minimum efforts. The algorithm can be implemented as part of Web Server layer, not as part of the business logic layer. It can be extended to support generating CSP for contents that are modified by JavaScript after loading. Current approach inspects the static contents of URLs.

Nowadays, with the rapid development of Internet, the use of Web is increasing and the Web applications have become a substantial part of people's daily life (e.g. E-Government, E-Health and E-Learning), as they permit to seamlessly access and manage information. The main security concern for e-business is Web application security. Web applications have many vulnerabilities such as Injection, Broken Authentication and Session Management, and Cross-site scripting (XSS). Subsequently, web applications have become targets of hackers, and a lot of cyber attack began to emerge in order to block the services of these Web applications (Denial of Service Attach). Developers are not aware of these vulnerabilities and have no enough time to secure their applications. Therefore, there is a significant need to study and improve attack detection for web applications through determining the most significant factors for detection. To the best of our knowledge, there is not any research that summarizes the influent factors of detection web attacks. In this paper, the author studies state-of-the-art techniques and research related to web attack detection: the author analyses and compares different methods of web attack detections and summarizes the most important factors for Web attack detection independent of the type of vulnerabilities. At the end, the author gives recommendation to build a framework for web application protection.

With the advent of World Wide Web, information sharing through internet increased drastically. So web applications security is today's most significant battlefield between attackers and resources of web service. It is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. By considering recent attacks it has been found that major attacks in Web Applications have been carried out even when system having most significant network level security. Poor input validation mechanisms that using in Web Applications shall causes to launching vulnerable web applications, which easy to exploit easy in future stages. Critical Web Application Vulnerabilities like Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Injections (SQL, PHP, LDAP, SSL, XML, Command, and Code) are happen because of base level Validations, and it is enough to update system in unauthorized way or may be causes to exploit the system. In this paper we present those issues in data validations strategies, to avoid deployment of vulnerable web applications.
 

Since the past 20 years the uses of web in daily life is increasing and becoming trend now. As the use of the web is increasing, the use of web application is also increasing. Apparently most of the web application exists up to today have some vulnerability that could be exploited by unauthorized person. Some of well-known web application vulnerabilities are Structured Query Language (SQL) Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF). By compromising with these web application vulnerabilities, the system cracker can gain information about the user and lead to the reputation of the respective organization. Usually the developers of web applications did not realize that their web applications have vulnerabilities. They only realize them when there is an attack or manipulation of their code by someone. This is normal as in a web application, there are thousands of lines of code, therefore it is not easy to detect if there are some loopholes. Nowadays as the hacking tools and hacking tutorials are easier to get, lots of new hackers are born. Even though SQL injection is very easy to protect against, there are still large numbers of the system on the internet are vulnerable to this type of attack because there will be a few subtle condition that can go undetected. Therefore, in this paper we propose a detection model for detecting and recognizing the web vulnerability which is; SQL Injection based on the defined and identified criteria. In addition, the proposed detection model will be able to generate a report regarding the vulnerability level of the web application. As the consequence, the proposed detection model should be able to decrease the possibility of the SQL Injection attack that can be launch onto the web application.

CSRFGuard is a tool running on the Java EE platform to defend Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, but there are some shortcomings: scripts should be inserted manually, dynamically created requests cannot be effectively handled as well as defense can be bypassed through Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). Corresponding improvements were made according to the shortcomings. The Servlet filter was used to intercept responses, and responses of pages' source codes were stored by a custom response wrapper class to add script tags, so that scripts were automatically inserted. JavaScript event delegation mechanism was used to bind forms with onfocus and onsubmit events, then dynamically created requests were effectively handled. Token dynamically added through event triggered effectively prevented defense bypassed through XSS. The experimental results show that improved CSRFGuard can be effective to defend CSRF attacks.
 

One of the major threats against web applications is Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). The final target of XSS attacks is the client running a particular web browser. During this last decade, several competing web browsers (IE, Netscape, Chrome, Firefox) have evolved to support new features. In this paper, we explore whether the evolution of web browsers is done using systematic security regression testing. Beginning with an analysis of their current exposure degree to XSS, we extend the empirical study to a decade of most popular web browser versions. We use XSS attack vectors as unit test cases and we propose a new method supported by a tool to address this XSS vector testing issue. The analysis on a decade releases of most popular web browsers including mobile ones shows an urgent need of XSS regression testing. We advocate the use of a shared security testing benchmark as a good practice and propose a first set of publicly available XSS vectors as a basis to ensure that security is not sacrificed when a new version is delivered.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a common attack technique that lets attackers insert the code in the output application of web page which is referred to the web browser of visitor and then the inserted code executes automatically and steals the sensitive information. In order to prevent the users from XSS attack, many client- side solutions have been implemented; most of them being used are the filters that sanitize the malicious input. However, many of these filters do not provide prevention to the newly designed sophisticated attacks such as multiple points of injection, injection into script etc. This paper proposes and implements an approach based on encoding unfiltered reflections for detecting vulnerable web applications which can be exploited using above mentioned sophisticated attacks. Results prove that the proposed approach provides accurate higher detection rate of exploits. In addition to this, an implementation of blocking the execution of malicious scripts have contributed to XSS-Me: an open source Mozilla Firefox security extension that detects for reflected XSS vulnerabilities which can be considered as an effective solution if it is integrated inside the browser rather than being enforced as an extension.

Dependence on web applications is increasing very rapidly in recent time for social communications, health problem, financial transaction and many other purposes. Unfortunately, presence of security weaknesses in web applications allows malicious user's to exploit various security vulnerabilities and become the reason of their failure. Currently, SQL Injection (SQLI) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are most dangerous security vulnerabilities exploited in various popular web applications i.e. eBay, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Research on defensive programming, vulnerability detection and attack prevention techniques has been quite intensive in the past decade. Defensive programming is a set of coding guidelines to develop secure applications. But, mostly developers do not follow security guidelines and repeat same type of programming mistakes in their code. Attack prevention techniques protect the applications from attack during their execution in actual environment. The difficulties associated with accurate detection of SQLI and XSS vulnerabilities in coding phase of software development life cycle. This paper proposes a classification of software security approaches used to develop secure software in various phase of software development life cycle. It also presents a survey of static analysis based approaches to detect SQL Injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in source code of web applications. The aim of these approaches is to identify the weaknesses in source code before their exploitation in actual environment. This paper would help researchers to note down future direction for securing legacy web applications in early phases of software development life cycle.

Most web applications have critical bugs (faults) affecting their security, which makes them vulnerable to attacks by hackers and organized crime. To prevent these security problems from occurring it is of utmost importance to understand the typical software faults. This paper contributes to this body of knowledge by presenting a field study on two of the most widely spread and critical web application vulnerabilities: SQL Injection and XSS. It analyzes the source code of security patches of widely used web applications written in weak and strong typed languages. Results show that only a small subset of software fault types, affecting a restricted collection of statements, is related to security. To understand how these vulnerabilities are really exploited by hackers, this paper also presents an analysis of the source code of the scripts used to attack them. The outcomes of this study can be used to train software developers and code inspectors in the detection of such faults and are also the foundation for the research of realistic vulnerability and attack injectors that can be used to assess security mechanisms, such as intrusion detection systems, vulnerability scanners, and static code analyzers.

Black-box web application vulnerability scanners are automated tools that probe web applications for security vulnerabilities. In order to assess the current state of the art, we obtained access to eight leading tools and carried out a study of: (i) the class of vulnerabilities tested by these scanners, (ii) their effectiveness against target vulnerabilities, and (iii) the relevance of the target vulnerabilities to vulnerabilities found in the wild. To conduct our study we used a custom web application vulnerable to known and projected vulnerabilities, and previous versions of widely used web applications containing known vulnerabilities. Our results show the promise and effectiveness of automated tools, as a group, and also some limitations. In particular, "stored" forms of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection (SQLI) vulnerabilities are not currently found by many tools. Because our goal is to assess the potential of future research, not to evaluate specific vendors, we do not report comparative data or make any recommendations about purchase of specific tools.