The approaches to quantify web application security scanners quality: A review

The web application security scanner is a computer program that assessed web application security with penetration testing technique. The benefit of automated web application penetration testing is huge, which web application security scanner not only reduced the time, cost, and resource required for web application penetration testing but also eliminate test engineer reliance on human knowledge. Nevertheless, web application security scanners are possessing weaknesses of low test coverage, and the scanners are generating inaccurate test results. Consequently, experimentations are frequently held to quantitatively quantify web application security scanner's quality to investigate the web application security scanner's strengths and limitations. However, there is a discovery that neither a standard methodology nor criterion is available for quantifying the web application security scanner's quality. Hence, in this paper systematic review is conducted and analysed the methodology and criterion used for quantifying web application security scanners' quality. In this survey, the experiment methodologies and criterions that had been used to quantify web application security scanner's quality is classified and review using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) protocol. The objectives are to provide practitioners with the understanding of methodologies and criterions that available for measuring web application security scanners' test coverage, attack coverage, and vulnerability detection rate, while provides the critical hint for development of the next testing framework, model, methodology, or criterions, to measure web application security scanner quality

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

Web 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

Nástroj pro penetrační testování webových aplikací

Abstract As hackers become more skilled and sophisticated and with cyber-attacks becoming the norm, it is more important than ever before to undertake regular vulnerability scans and penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities and ensure on a regular basis that the cyber controls are working. In this thesis the importance and working of penetration testing and web application based penetration testing are discussed, followed by comparison and information’s about various testing tools and techniques and their advantages and disadvantages. The next section of the thesis mainly focuses on the past, current and future state of penetration testing in the computer systems and application security, importance of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Content Management system (CMS) followed by the main goal of the thesis which explains the existing solutions in automated tools for vulnerability detection of web application their techniques, positive and negative results of the conducted tests and their merits and demerits. In the next section, based on the comparison of various existing tools selecting appropriate algorithm for discussing the importance of scanning the ports which are usually focused in very few existing web application tools, the following section practically demonstrate the scanning of ports which gives information regarding, the state of ports to understand the service information running on the server. Finally the result of the experiment will be compared with the existing web application tools.Abstraktní Vzhledem k tomu, že se hackeři stávají zkušenějšími a sofistikovanějšími a kybernetické útoky se stávají normou, je důležitější než kdy jindy provádět pravidelné kontroly zranitelnosti a penetrační testování, aby bylo možné identifikovat zranitelná místa a pravidelně zajišťovat fungování kybernetických kontrol. V této práci je diskutován význam a fungování penetračního testování a penetračního testování založeného na webových aplikacích, následuje srovnání a informace o různých testovacích nástrojích a technikách a jejich výhodách a nevýhodách. Další část práce se zaměřuje především na minulý, současný a budoucí stav penetračního testování v počítačových systémech a zabezpečení aplikací, význam nařízení o obecné ochraně údajů (GDPR) a redakčního systému (CMS) následovaného hlavním cílem práce, která vysvětluje stávající řešení v automatizovaných nástrojích pro zjišťování zranitelnosti webové aplikace, jejich techniky, pozitivní a negativní výsledky provedených testů a jejich přednosti a nedostatky. V další části, založené na srovnání různých existujících nástrojů, které vybírají vhodný algoritmus pro diskusi o důležitosti skenování portů, které jsou obvykle zaměřeny na velmi málo stávajících webových aplikací, následující část prakticky demonstruje skenování portů, které poskytují informace týkající se, stav portů pro pochopení informací o službě běžících na serveru. Nakonec bude výsledek experimentu porovnán s existujícími nástroji webové aplikace.460 - Katedra informatikyvelmi dobř

Evaluation of Web vulnerability scanners based on OWASP benchmark

Web applications have become an integral part of everyday life, but many of these applications are deployed with critical vulnerabilities that can be fatally exploited. Web Vulnerability scanners have been widely adopted for the detection of vulnerabilities in web applications by checking through the applications with the attackers’ perspectives. However, studies have shown that vulnerability scanners perform differently on detection of vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the effectiveness of some of these scanners has become questionable due to the ever-growing cyber-attacks that have been exploiting undetected vulnerabilities in some web applications. To evaluate the effectiveness of these scanners, people often run these scanners against a benchmark web application with known vulnerabilities. This thesis first presents our results on the effectiveness of two popular web vulnerability scanners based on the OWASP benchmark, which is a benchmark developed by OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project), a prestigious non-profit web security organization. The two scanners chosen in this thesis are OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (OWASP ZAP) and Arachni. As there are many categories of web vulnerabilities and we cannot evaluate the scanner performance on all of them due to time limitation, we pick the following four major vulnerability categories in our thesis: Command Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Light Weight Access Protocol (LDAP) Injection, and SQL Injection. Moreover, we compare our results on scanner effectiveness from the OWASP benchmark with the existing results from Web Application Vulnerability Security Evaluation Project (WAVSEP) benchmark, another popular benchmark used to evaluate scanner effectiveness. We are the first to make this comparison between these two benchmarks in literature. The results mainly show that: - Scanners perform differently in different vulnerability categories. That is, no scanner can serve as the all-rounder in scanning web vulnerabilities. - The benchmarks also demonstrate different capabilities in reflecting the effectiveness of scanners in different vulnerability categories. It is recommended to combine the results from different benchmarks to determine the effectiveness of a scanner. - Regarding scanner effectiveness, OWASP ZAP performs the best in CMDI, SQLI, and XSS; Arachni performs the best in LDAP. - Regarding benchmark capability, OWASP benchmark outperforms WAVSEP benchmark in all the examined categories

Security Testing: A Survey

Identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring security functionality by security testing is a widely applied measure to evaluate and improve the security of software. Due to the openness of modern software-based systems, applying appropriate security testing techniques is of growing importance and essential to perform effective and efficient security testing. Therefore, an overview of actual security testing techniques is of high value both for researchers to evaluate and refine the techniques and for practitioners to apply and disseminate them. This chapter fulfills this need and provides an overview of recent security testing techniques. For this purpose, it first summarize the required background of testing and security engineering. Then, basics and recent developments of security testing techniques applied during the secure software development lifecycle, i.e., model-based security testing, code-based testing and static analysis, penetration testing and dynamic analysis, as well as security regression testing are discussed. Finally, the security testing techniques are illustrated by adopting them for an example three-tiered web-based business application

Implementation and analysis of website security mining system, applied to universities\u27 academic networks

Sve je uobičajenije za web aplikacije i poslužitelje za pohranu podataka rukovanje putem programskog rješenja u oblaku; stoga je sve veći broj ljudi koji svoje privatne podatke stavljaju na internet, motivirajući istraživanje mogućnosti programskog rješenja u oblaku, sigurnosti baza podataka i kodiranih nadležnosti. U procjeni Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)-a, ubacivanje SQL-a jedan je od najopasnijih napadnih vektora na sigurnost interneta. Imajući to u vidu, uveli smo sustav nazvan sustav za probijanje sigurnosti web mjesta, koji pokreće algoritam za pretraživanje weba kako bi analizirao propuste na zaštiti URL-a i adresa e-pošte ispitivanjem crnih kutija web mjesta 20 poznatih sveučilišta. Na temelju naših podataka, održavatelji akademskih web mjesta mogu saznati kakvoj su opasnosti izloženi, kojim URL-ovima prijeti veća opasnost i što učiniti kako bi uredili web stranicu za zaštitu od ranjivosti i sprijećili napade na akademske resurse. Nadamo se da će se u budućnosti veća pažnja posvetiti sigurnosti informacija na akademskim mrežama, kako se to danas čini s komercijalnim i vladinim mrežama.It is becoming increasingly common for web application and data storage services to be handled by cloud computing; therefore, more and more people are putting their private information on the internet, motivating research into cloud computing, database security and authority encryption. In the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) assessment, SQL injection is one of the most dangerous attack vectors in internet security. With this in mind, we have implemented a system named the website security mining system, which leverages a web crawling algorithm to analyze web URL and e-mail address leaks through black-box testing of 20 well-known universities’ websites. Based on our data, academic website maintainers can be clearly informed about what kind of danger they are exposed to, which URLs are highly in danger, and the need to patch the website to protect against vulnerabilities and prevent academic resources from attacks. We hope that in the future, academic networks will gain more attention in the information security community, just like commercial and government networks today

Security-aware selection of Web Services for Reliable Composition

Dependability is an important characteristic that a trustworthy computer system should have. It is a measure of Availability, Reliability, Maintainability, Safety and Security. The focus of our research is on security of web services. Web services enable the composition of independent services with complementary functionalities to produce value-added services, which allows organizations to implement their core business only and outsource other service components over the Internet, either pre-selected or on-the-fly. The selected third party web services may have security vulnerabilities. Vulnerable web services are of limited practical use. We propose to use an intrusion-tolerant composite web service for each functionality that should be fulfilled by a third party web service. The third party services employed in this approach should be selected based on their security vulnerabilities in addition to their performance. The security vulnerabilities of the third party services are assessed using a penetration testing tool. In this paper we present our preliminary research work