Perturbation-based user-input-validation testing of web applications

Abstract

User-input-validation (UIV) is the first barricade that protects web applications from application-level attacks. Most UIV test tools cannot detect semantics-related vulnerabilities in validators, such as filling a five-digit number to a field that accepts a year. To address this issue, we propose a new approach to generate test inputs for UIV based on the analysis of client-side information. In particular, we use input-field information to generate valid inputs, and then perturb valid inputs to generate invalid test inputs. We conducted an empirical study to evaluate our approach. The empirical result shows that, in comparison to existing vulnerability scanners, our approach is more effective than existing vulnerability scanners in finding semantics-related vulnerabilities of UIV for web applications.