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An Efficient Black-Box Vulnerability Scanning Method for Web Application

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Book cover Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2017)

Abstract

To discover web vulnerabilities before they are exploited by malicious attackers, black-box vulnerability scanners scan all the web pages of a web application. However, a web application implemented by several server-side programs with a backend database can generate a massive number of web pages, and may raise an unaffordable time consuming. The root cause of vulnerabilities is the mal-implemented server-side program, instead of any certain web pages that generated by the server-side program. In this paper, an efficient black-box web vulnerability scanning method – handler-ready – is proposed, which highlights the scanning on the server-side programs – handlers – rather than concrete web pages. Handler-ready reduces the HTTP requests of massive web pages to a small number of handlers, and gives the handlers an even chance of being scanned. Therefore, the handler-ready can avoid being stuck with massive web pages that generated by the same handler when scanning. The experimental result shows that the proposed scanning method can discover more vulnerabilities than traditional methods in a limited amount of time.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Key R&D Plan of China under grant no. 2016YFB0800201, the Natural Science Foundation of China under grant no. 61070212 and 61572165, the State Key Program of Zhejiang Province Natural Science Foundation of China under grant no. LZ15F020003, the Key research and development plan project of Zhejiang Province under grant no. 2017C01065, the Key Lab of Information Network Security, Ministry of Public Security, under grant no C16603.

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Correspondence to Ming Xu or Tao Yang .

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© 2018 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Jin, H., Xu, M., Yang, X., Wu, T., Zheng, N., Yang, T. (2018). An Efficient Black-Box Vulnerability Scanning Method for Web Application. In: Romdhani, I., Shu, L., Takahiro, H., Zhou, Z., Gordon, T., Zeng, D. (eds) Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. CollaborateCom 2017. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 252. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00916-8_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00916-8_42

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00915-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00916-8

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