Evaluation of Black-Box Web Application Security Scanners in Detecting Injection Vulnerabilities

Abstract

With the Internet’s meteoric rise in popularity and usage over the years, there has been a significant increase in the number of web applications. Nearly all organisations use them for various purposes, such as e-commerce, e-banking, e-learning, and social networking. More importantly, web applications have become increasingly vulnerable to malicious attack. To find web vulnerabilities before an attacker, security experts use black-box web application vulnerability scanners to check for security vulnerabilities in web applications. Most studies have evaluated these black-box scanners against various vulnerable web applications. However, most tested applications are traditional (non-dynamic) and do not reflect current web. This study evaluates the detection accuracy of five black-box web application vulnerability scanners against one of the most modern and sophisticated insecure web applications, representing a real-life e-commerce. The tested vulnerabilities are injection vulnerabilities, in particular, structured query language (SQLi) injection, not only SQL (NoSQL), and server-side template injection (SSTI). We also tested the black-box scanners in four modes to identify their limitations. The findings show that the black-box scanners overlook most vulnerabilities in almost all modes and some scanners missed all the vulnerabilities.