An efficient artificial intelligence approach for early detection of cross-site scripting attacks

Abstract

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks continue to pose a significant threat to web applications, compromising the security and integrity of user data. XSS is a web application vulnerability where malicious scripts are injected into websites, allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code in the victim’s browser. The consequences of XSS attacks can be severe, ranging from financial losses to compromising sensitive user information. XSS attacks enable attackers to deface websites, distribute malware, or launch phishing campaigns, compromising the trust and reputation of affected organizations. This study proposes an efficient artificial intelligence approach for the early detection of XSS attacks, utilizing machine learning and deep learning approaches, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Additionally, advanced feature engineering techniques, such as the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF), are applied and compared to evaluate results. We introduce a novel approach named LSTM-TFIDF (LSTF) for feature extraction, which combines temporal and TFIDF features from the cross-site scripting dataset, resulting in a new feature set. Extensive research experiments demonstrate that the random forest method achieved a high performance of 0.99, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches using the proposed features. A k-fold cross-validation mechanism is utilized to validate the performance of applied methods, and hyperparameter tuning further enhances the performance of XSS attack detection. We have applied Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to understand the interpretability and transparency of the proposed model in detecting XSS attacks. This study makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of knowledge on XSS attacks and provides an efficient model for developers and security practitioners to enhance the security of web applications.