Web Vulnerability Scanners Research Articles

Enhanced Study of Deep Learning Algorithms for Web Vulnerability Scanner

The detection of online vulnerabilities is the most important task for network security. In this paper, deep learning methodologies for dealing with tough or complicated challenges are investigated using convolutional neural networks, long-short-term memory, and generative adversarial networks.Experimental results demonstrate that deep learning approaches can significantly outperform standard methods when compared to them. In addition, we examine the various aspects that affect performance. This work can provide researchers with useful direction when designing network architecture and parameters for identifying web attacks.

Online Change of Grade Attack Using SQL Injection Case Study: FUTA Cyber Security Department

Advancement in technology has made many universities to adopt the system of storing students' results in online databases in both developed and developing countries for easy accessibility and to eliminate redundancy. However, these are subject to different types of attacks ranging from hardware to software attacks. In Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA), Cyber Security department is not left out because attackers contribute a potential threat to the institution's information security. There are various methods attackers can use to carry out this malicious act, but this research considered SQL injection attacks. The researcher reviews related works, designs and implements student database applications for FUTA Cyber Security department. The research demonstrates how SQL injection can be used to change student grades and preventive measures to minimize SQL injection attacks, such as avoiding sharing database accounts using different sites or applications, regular updates of database software, regular update of security patches and passwords and regular scanning of web applications with a web vulnerability scanner.

A comparative study of web application security scanners for vulnerability detection

A Web Vulnerability Scanner (WVS) is a software tool that assesses the security of web applications by conducting automated penetration tests. It speeds up the process, reduces costs, and eliminates the need for specialized testing engineers. This study evaluates the vulnerability detection capabilities of six WVSs, three commercial scanners, and three open-source scanners. The goal is to identify and mitigate potential security risks before they are exploited by malicious users. The study employed two well-known vulnerable web applications and four relevant metrics, such as detection rate of accuracy, recall, precision, and the ability to detect different vulnerabilities using the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) as a reference.

LogInjector: Detecting Web Application Log Injection Vulnerabilities

Web applications widely use the logging functionality, but improper handling can bring serious security threats. An attacker can trigger the execution of malicious data by writing malicious data to the web application logs and then accessing the view–logs interface, resulting in a vulnerability of the web application log injection. However, detecting this type of vulnerability requires automatic discovery of log-injectable interfaces and view–logs interfaces, which is difficult. In addition, bypasssing the application-specific input-filtering checks to write an effective payload to the log is also challenging. This paper proposes LogInjector, an efficient web application log injection vulnerability detection method. First, it obtains the log storage form and location and then finds the log-injectable interfaces through the extended dynamic crawler. Second, it automatically identifies the web application view–logs interfaces. Finally, LogInjector utilizes a dynamic testing approach based on the feedback-guided mutation to detect web application log injection vulnerabilities. To verify the effectiveness of LogInjector, we test it in 14 popular web applications in real-world cases and compare it with Black Widow, the state-of-the-art web vulnerability scanner. LogInjector detects 16 web application log injection vulnerabilities, including 6 zero-day vulnerabilities, while Black Widow can only detect three log injection vulnerabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of LogInjector in practice.

Enhancing Burp Suite with Machine Learning Extension for Vulnerability Assessment of Web Applications

Today’s web represents the most extensive engineered system ever created by humankind. Web security is critical to web application providers and end-users. Burp Suite is established as a state-of-the-art and fully featured set of tools for web vulnerability scanners. This paper presents a novel approach using state of the art Machine Learning algorithms applied to the Burp Suite extension. These algorithms were used to scan for: SQL injection, Cross-Site Request Forgery, and XML External Entity vulnerabilities in university web applications. The results show that the best algorithm is Long Short-Term Memory and that the targeted website is safe to use.

Using WAF to protect the university’s internal services in the Zero Trust structure

The article presents the results of a pilot study on the use of a Web Application Firewall (Web Application Firewall or WAF) to protect the internal services of the information educational environment of the university (IEEU). It is shown that this task is extremely important in the context of globalization of education. The use of WAF is performed in the Zero Trust structure. The system was tested in two stages. Firstly, tools were used to automate the search for web vulnerabilities (web vulnerability scanners) IEEU. At the second stage, manual testing of applications for vulnerabilities of SQL injection, cross-site scripting and Path Traversal attacks was carried out. It is shown that the results obtained make it possible to improve the protection of services in the university’s local networks, which is important for achieving the ultimate goal effective protection of end users and IEEU services in the context of globalization of education. It has been established that the use of WAF in systems with zero trust is a fairly common option for protecting services within organizations, including educational ones. It is shown that the use of open WAF solutions in the Zero Trust structure allows you to more flexibly and personally adjust protection to the appropriate needs of university services.

Web Vulnerability Detection Analyzer Based on Python

In the information age, hackers will use Web vulnerabilities to infiltrate websites, resulting in many security incidents. To solve this problem, security-conscious enterprises or individuals will conduct penetration tests on websites to test and analyze the security of websites, but penetration tests often take a lot of time. Therefore, based on the traditional Web vulnerability scanner, the Web vulnerability detection analyzer designed in this article uses vulnerability detection technologies such as sub-domain scanning, application fingerprint recognition, and web crawling to penetrate the website. The vulnerability scanning process of the website using log records and HTML output helps users discover the vulnerability information of the website in a short time, patch the website in time. It can reduce the security risks caused by website vulnerabilities.

Web Security: Emerging Threats and Defense

Web applications have become a widely accepted method to support the internet for the past decade. Since they have been successfully installed in the business activities and there is a requirement of advanced functionalities, the configuration is growing and becoming more complicated. The growing demand and complexity also make these web applications a preferred target for intruders on the internet. Even with the support of security specialists, they remain highly problematic for the complexity of penetration and code reviewing methods. It requires considering different testing patterns in both codes reviewing and penetration testing. As a result, the number of hacked websites is increasing day by day. Most of these vulnerabilities also occur due to incorrect input validation and lack of result validation for lousy programming practices or coding errors. Vulnerability scanners for web applications can detect a few vulnerabilities in a dynamic approach. These are quite easy to use; however, these often miss out on some of the unique critical vulnerabilities in a different and static approach. Although these are time-consuming, they can find complex vulnerabilities and improve developer knowledge in coding and best practices. Many scanners choose both dynamic and static approaches, and the developers can select them based on their requirements and conditions. This research explores and provides details of SQL injection, operating system command injection, path traversal, and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities through dynamic and static approaches. It also examines various security measures in web applications and selected five tools based on their features for scanning PHP, and JAVA code focuses on SQL injection, cross-site scripting, Path Traversal, operating system command. Moreover, this research discusses the approach of a cyber-security tester or a security developer finding out vulnerabilities through dynamic and static approaches using manual and automated web vulnerability scanners.

Design of web vulnerability scanner based on go language

The vulnerability scanner designed in this paper completed the collection of information and scanning of vulnerability, including six parts: input assets, asset collection, vulnerability profile, plug-in upload, single case detection and report display. The framework of vue realized the front end that included six pages, and the framework of gin realized the back end. The interface completed the separation of the front and back end. The database using MySQL designed seven tables. This scanner can avoid tedious and repetitive work, it can realize automatic scanning and testing of network vulnerabilities.

An empirical comparison of commercial and open‐source web vulnerability scanners

SummaryWeb vulnerability scanners (WVSs) are tools that can detect security vulnerabilities in web services. Although both commercial and open‐source WVSs exist, their vulnerability detection capability and performance vary. In this article, we report on a comparative study to determine the vulnerability detection capabilities of eight WVSs (both open and commercial) using two vulnerable web applications: WebGoat and Damn vulnerable web application. The eight WVSs studied were: Acunetix; HP WebInspect; IBM AppScan; OWASP ZAP; Skipfish; Arachni; Vega; and Iron WASP. The performance was evaluated using multiple evaluation metrics: precision; recall; Youden index; OWASP web benchmark evaluation; and the web application security scanner evaluation criteria. The experimental results show that, while the commercial scanners are effective in detecting security vulnerabilities, some open‐source scanners (such as ZAP and Skipfish) can also be effective. In summary, this study recommends improving the vulnerability detection capabilities of both the open‐source and commercial scanners to enhance code coverage and the detection rate, and to reduce the number of false‐positives.

Penetration Testing Untuk Deteksi Vulnerability Sistem Informasi Kampus

Security is an effort that can be done to protect the information contained in it which refers to confidentiality. Information systems that are centrally prone to various types of attacks such as DoS, SQL Injections, Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Clickjacking, CSRF / Cross-site request forgery and so on. This will be a polemic for the information service owner and manager. The method to be carried out in this study is to do penetration testing to audit the security of the campus information system webserver. This activity aims to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in the web server. In this study, several tools will be used as a tool, including WHOIS, NMAP and Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner. Tests carried out are to look for vulnerabilities on the web server while the level of vulnerability that will be detected in this test sawill be inter alia higt risk, Medium risk and low risk. The aim is to find out the weaknesses in the web server so that in the future it can avoid DoS attacks, CSRF / Cross-site request forgery, Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and clickjacking. The results of this test are expected to be an input for the management of campus information systems for the future can be made improvements to existing weaknesses.

Comparing Web Vulnerability Scanners with a New Method for SQL Injection Vulnerabilities Detection and Removal EPSQLiFix

Comparing Web Vulnerability Scanners with a New Method for SQL Injection Vulnerabilities Detection and Removal EPSQLiFix

Enlargement of vulnerable web applications for testing

There are two main kinds of vulnerable web applications, usual applications developed with a specific aim and applications which are vulnerable by design. On one hand, the usual applications are those that are used everywhere and on a daily basis, and where vulnerabilities are detected, and often mended, such as online banking systems, newspaper sites, or any other Web site. On the other hand, vulnerable by design web applications are developed for proper evaluation of web vulnerability scanners and for training in detecting web vulnerabilities. The main drawback of vulnerable by design web applications is that they used to include just a short set of well-known types of vulnerabilities, usually from famous classifications like the OWASP Top Ten. They do not include most of the types of web vulnerabilities. In this paper, an analysis and assessment of vulnerable web applications is conducted in order to select the applications that include the larger set of types of vulnerabilities. Then those applications are enlarged with more types of web vulnerabilities that vulnerable web applications do not include. Lastly, the new vulnerable web applications have been analyzed to check whether web vulnerability scanners are able to detect the new added vulnerabilities, those vulnerabilities that vulnerable by design web applications do not include. The results show that the tools are not very successful in detecting those vulnerabilities, less than well-known vulnerabilities.

Performance-Based Comparative Assessment of Open Source Web Vulnerability Scanners

The widespread adoption of web vulnerability scanners and the differences in the functionality provided by these tool-based vulnerability detection approaches increase the demand for testing their detection effectiveness. Despite the advantages of dynamic testing approaches, the literature lacks studies that systematically evaluate the performance of open source web vulnerability scanners. The main objectives of this study are to assess the performance of open source scanners from multiple perspectives and to examine their detection capability. This paper presents the results of a comparative evaluation of the security features as well as the performance of four web vulnerability detection tools. We followed this comparative assessment with a case study in which we evaluate the level of agreement between the results reported by two open source web vulnerability scanners. Given that the results of our comparative evaluation did not show significant performance differences among the scanners while the results of the conducted case study revealed high level of disagreement between the reports generated by different scanners, we conclude that the inconsistencies between the reports generated by different scanners might not necessarily correlate with their performance properties. We also present some recommendations for helping developers of web vulnerabilities scanners to improve their tools’ capabilities.

Web Application Security: Threats, Countermeasures, and Pitfalls

Penetration testing is a crucial defense against common web application security threats such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. A proposed web vulnerability scanner automatically generates test data with combinative evasion techniques, significantly expanding test coverage and revealing more vulnerabilities.

Testing and Comparing Result Scanning Using Web Vulnerability Scanner

Testing and Comparing Result Scanning Using Web Vulnerability Scanner

An automated black box approach for web vulnerability identification and attack scenario generation

Web applications have become increasingly vulnerable and exposed to malicious attacks that could affect essential properties of information systems such as confidentiality, integrity, or availability. To cope with these threats, it is necessary to develop efficient security protection mechanisms and assessment techniques (firewall, intrusion detection system, Web scanner, etc.). This paper presents a new methodology, based on Web page clustering techniques, that is aimed at identifying the vulnerabilities of a Web application following a black box analysis of the target application. Each identified vulnerability is actually exploited to ensure that it does not correspond to a false positive. The proposed approach can also highlight different potential attack scenarios including the exploitation of several successive vulnerabilities, taking into account explicitly the dependencies between these vulnerabilities. We have focused in particular on code injection vulnerabilities, such as SQL injections. The proposed methodology led to the development of a new Web vulnerability scanner that has been validated experimentally on several examples of vulnerable applications.

A new algorithm for detecting SQL injection attack in Web application

Nowadays, the security of applications and Web servers is a new trend that finds its need on the Web. The number of vulnerabilities identified in this type of applications is constantly increasing especially SQL injection attack. It is therefore necessary to regularly audit Web applications to verify the presence of exploitable vulnerabilities. Web vulnerability scanner WASAPY is one of the audit tool, it uses an algorithm which bases on a classification techniques of pages obtained by sending HTTP requests especially formatted. We propose in this paper a new algorithm which was built in a vision to improve rather to supplement the logic followed in modeling WASAPY tool. The tool was supplemented by a new class reflecting the legitimate appearance or referential, therefore, the detection mechanism was solidly built on a statistic in a fairly clear mathematical framework described by a simple geometric representation or interpretation.

Web from preprocessor for crawling

Usually organizations deploy web applications into the production environment with vulnerabilities. To avoid it, organizations need to run a web application vulnerability assessment. The most prevalent kind of vulnerability assessment is when the tester uses a vulnerability scanner. This assessment can be divided into two phases: crawling and testing. The purpose of the first phase is to gather all the access points of the application. In the second phase the tester sends some malformed values to the application, and then analyze the response looking for known vulnerability patterns. The crawling phase is critical because if the tester cannot reach the applications content, he or she couldn't test that content to find vulnerabilities. One of the main challenges of crawling web applications are to fill out web forms with correct values. To face this challenge, web vulnerability scanners used to include a generic list of field value pairs. These scanners also let the tester to add new pairs. This paper presents a novel method for searching candidate web form field values. The challenge is to map more applications content than using the field value pairs included by default. Our method will try to get form fields values executing the client side code and looking for candidate values in an external data source.We have test the proposed method and the experiments show that it can improve the crawling phase of dynamic vulnerability assessment.