Query: XSS

title: An ensemble learning approach for XSS attack detection with domain knowledge and threat intelligence
abstract: attack is one of the most dangerous attacks for web security. Traditional XSS detection methods mainly focus on the vulnerability itself, relying on static analysis and dynamic analysis, which appear weak in defending the flood of various kinds of payloads. In this paper, the XSS attack detection method is proposed based on an ensemble learning approach which utilizes a set of Bayesian networks, and each Bayesian network is built with both domain knowledge and threat intelligence. Besides, an analysis method is proposed to further explain the results, which sorts nodes in the Bayesian network according to their influences on the output node. The results are explainable to the end users. To validate the proposed method, experiments are performed on a real world dataset about the XSS attack. The results show the priority of the proposed method, especially when the number of attacks increases. Moreover, the node sorting results could help the security team to cope with the attack in time.

title: Fighting Against XSS Attacks: A Usability Evaluation of OWASP ESAPI Output Encoding
abstract: Cross Site Scripting (XSS) is one of the most critical vulnerabilities exist in web applications. XSS can be prevented by encoding untrusted data that are loaded into browser content of web applications. Security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) such as OWASP ESAPI provide output encoding functionalities for programmers to use to protect their applications from XSS attacks. However, XSS still being ranked as one of the most critical vulnerabilities in web applications suggests that programmers are not effectively using those APIs to encode untrusted data. Therefore, we conducted an experimental study with 10 programmers where they attempted to fix XSS vulnerabilities of a web application using the output encoding functionality of OWASP ESAPI. Results revealed 3 types of mistakes that programmers made which resulted in them failing to fix the application by removing XSS vulnerabilities. We also identified 16 usability issues of OWASP ESAPI. We identified that some of these usability issues as the reason for mistakes that programmers made. Based on these results, we provided suggestions on how the usability of output encoding APIs should be improved to give a better experience to programmers.

title: MLPXSS: An Integrated XSS Based Attack Detection Scheme in Web Applications Using Multilayer Perceptron Technique
abstract: Dynamic web applications play a vital role in providing resources manipulation and interaction between clients and servers. The features presently supported by browsers have raised business opportunities, by supplying high interactivity in web based services, like web banking, e commerce, social networking, forums, and at the same time, these features have brought serious risks and increased vulnerabilities in web applications that enable cyber attacks to be executed. One of the common high risk cyber attack of web application vulnerabilities is cross site scripting (XSS) Nowadays, XSS is still dramatically increasing and considered as one of the most severe threats for organizations, users, and developers. If the ploy is successful, the victim is at the mercy of the cybercriminals. In this research, a robust artificial neural network based multilayer perceptron (MLP) scheme integrated with the dynamic feature extractor is proposed for XSS attack detection. The detection scheme adopts a large real world dataset, the dynamic features extraction mechanism, and MLP model, which successfully surpassed several tests on an employed unique dataset under careful experimentation, and achieved promising and state of the art results with accuracy, detection probabilities, false positive rate, and AUC ROC scores of 99.32% 98.35 0.3% and 99.02% respectively. Therefore, it has the potentials to be applied for XSS based attack detection in either the client side or the server side.

title: A client server JavaScript code rewriting based framework to detect the XSS worms from online social network
abstract: This article presents a client server JavaScript code rewriting based framework that protects and preserves the privacy of online users against XSS worms on Online Social Network (OSN) The server side generates an estimation graph which is explored for extracting the JavaScript code and shifts such code in a separate file. This shifting is done for completely isolating the untrusted JavaScript code and data. The client side performs runtime monitoring of the dynamic JavaScript code to recognize the tainted flow of untrusted JavaScript variables. The context of such dynamic tainted variables is determined, for performing the string analysis to examine whether it may be considered as vulnerable point or not. Finally, decoding operation is performed on the obfuscated malicious JavaScript code and the JavaScript code embedded in the parameter values of HTTP request. If match is found, then XSS attack vector is present. Otherwise, it is not. The authors have developed their prototype on the Java development framework and have estimated the malicious script alleviation capability of this proposed work on tested web applications (Humhub, Elgg, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal)

title: A Fault Driven Combinatorial Process for Model Evolution in XSS Vulnerability Detection
abstract: We consider the case where a knowledge base consists of interactions among parameter values in an input parameter model for web application security testing. The input model gives rise to attack strings to be used for exploiting XSS vulnerabilities, a critical threat towards the security of web applications. Testing results are then annotated with a vulnerability triggering or non triggering classification, and such security knowledge findings are added back to the knowledge base, making the resulting attack capabilities superior for newly requested input models. We present our approach as an iterative process that evolves an input model for security testing. Empirical evaluation on six real world web application shows that the process effectively evolves a knowledge base for XSS vulnerability detection, achieving on average 78.8% accuracy.

title: A Survey of Exploitation and Detection Methods of XSS Vulnerabilities
abstract: As web applications become more prevalent, web security becomes more and more important. Cross site scripting vulnerability abbreviated as XSS is a kind of common injection web vulnerability. The exploitation of XSS vulnerabilities can hijack users' sessions, modify, read and delete business data of web applications, place malicious codes in web applications, and control victims to attack other targeted servers. This paper discusses classification of XSS, and designs a demo website to demonstrate attack processes of common XSS exploitation scenarios. The paper also compares and analyzes recent research results on XSS detection, divides them into three categories according to different mechanisms. The three categories are static analysis methods, dynamic analysis methods and hybrid analysis methods. The paper classifies 30 detection methods into above three categories, makes overall comparative analysis among them, lists their strengths and weaknesses and detected XSS vulnerability types. In the end, the paper explores some ways to prevent XSS vulnerabilities from being exploited.

title: A Comparison of Machine Learning Algorithms for Detecting XSS Attacks
abstract: With the rapid increase of web applications, the problem of XSS (cross site scripting) attacks in Web applications is becoming more and more serious. In the face of more and more complex and changeable XSS attacks, the traditional XSS defense method cannot solve the problem of XSS security, inefficient and accurate recognition effect is poor. Therefore, this paper summarizes the method of XSS recognition based on the machine learning algorithm, classifies different machine learning algorithms according to the recognition strategy, analyzes their advantages and disadvantages, and finally looks forward to the development trend of XSS defense research, hoping to play a reference role for the following researchers.

title: DjangoChecker: Applying extended taint tracking and server side parsing for detection of context sensitive XSS flaws
abstract: Cross site scripting (XSS) flaws are a class of security flaws that permit the injection of malicious code into a web application. In simple situations, these flaws can be caused by missing input sanitizations. Sometimes, however, all application inputs are sanitized, but the sanitizations are not appropriate for the browser contexts of the sanitized values. Using an incorrect sanitizer can make the application look protected, when it is in fact vulnerable as if no sanitization was used, creating a context sensitive XSS flaw. To discover context sensitive XSS flaws, we introduce DjangoChecker. DjangoChecker combines extended dynamic taint tracking with a model browser for context analysis. We demonstrate the practical application of DjangoChecker on eight mature web applications based on Django, discovering previously unknown flaws in seven of the eight applications, including highly severe flaws that allow arbitrary JavaScript execution in the seven flawed applications.

title: Classification of XSS Attacks by Machine Learning with Frequency of Appearance and Co occurrence
abstract: Cross site scripting (XSS) attack is one of the attacks on the web. It brings session hijack with HTTP cookies, information collection with fake HTML input form and phishing with dummy sites. As a countermeasure of XSS attack, machine learning has attracted a lot of attention. There are existing researches in which SVM, Random Forest and SCW are used for the detection of the attack. However, in the researches, there are problems that the size of data set is too small or unbalanced, and that preprocessing method for vectorization of strings causes misclassification. The highest accuracy of the classification was 98% in existing researches. Therefore, in this paper, we improved the preprocessing method for vectorization by using word2vec to find the frequency of appearance and co occurrence of the words in XSS attack scripts. Moreover, we also used a large data set to decrease the deviation of the data. Furthermore, we evaluated the classification results with two procedures. One is an inappropriate procedure which some researchers tend to select by mistake. The other is an appropriate procedure which can be applied to an attack detection filter in the real environment.

title: Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Detection Integrating Evidences in Multiple Stages
abstract: As Cross Site Scripting (XSS) remains one of the top web security risks, people keep exploring ways to detect such attacks efficiently. So far, existing solutions only focus on the payload in a web request or a response, a single stage of a web transaction. This work proposes a new approach that integrates evidences from both a web request and its response in order to better characterize XSS attacks and separate them from normal web transactions. We first collect complete payloads of XSS and normal web transactions from two databases and extract features from them using the Word2vec technique. Next, we train two Gaussian mixture models (GMM) with these features, one for XSS transaction and one for normal web transactions. These two models can generate two probability scores for a new web transaction, which indicate how similar this web transaction is to XSS and normal traffics respectively. Finally, we put together these two GMM models in classification by combining these two probabilities to further improve detection accuracy.