XGBXSS: An Extreme Gradient Boosting Detection Framework for Cross-Site Scripting Attacks Based on Hybrid Feature Selection Approach and Parameters Optimization

Abstract

With the widespread popularity of the Internet and the transformation of the world into a global village, Web applications have been drawn increased attention over the years by companies, organizations, and social media, making it a prime target for cyber-attacks. The cross-site scripting attack (XSS) is one of the most severe concerns, which has been highlighted in the forefront of information security experts' reports. In this study, we proposed XGBXSS, a novel web-based XSS attack detection framework based on an ensemble-learning technique using the Extreme Gradient Boosting algorithm (XGboost) with extreme parameters optimization approach. An enhanced feature extraction method is presented to extract the most useful features from the developed dataset. Furthermore, a novel hybrid approach for features selection is proposed, comprising information gain (IG) fusing with sequential backward selection (SBS) to select an optimal subset reducing the computational costs and maintaining the high-performance of detector' simultaneously. The proposed framework has successfully exceeded several tests on the holdout testing dataset and achieved avant-garde results with accuracy, precision, detection probabilities, F-score, false-positive rate, false-negative rate, and AUC-ROC scores of 99.59%, 99.53 %, 99.01%, 99.27%, 0.18%, 0.98%, and 99.41%, respectively. Moreover, it can bridge the existing research gap concerning previous detectors, with a higher detection rate and lesser computational complexity. It also has the potential to be deployed as a self-reliant system, which is efficient enough to defeat such attacks, including zero-day XSS-based attacks.