Efficiency and Effectiveness of Web Application Vulnerability Detection Approaches: A Review

Abstract

Most existing surveys and reviews on web application vulnerability detection (WAVD) approaches focus on comparing and summarizing the approaches’ technical details. Although some studies have analyzed the efficiency and effectiveness of specific methods, there is a lack of a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the efficiency and effectiveness of various WAVD approaches. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of WAVD approaches and analyzed their efficiency and effectiveness. We identified 105 primary studies out of 775 WAVD articles published between January 2008 and June 2019. Our study identified 10 categories of artifacts analyzed by the WAVD approaches and 8 categories of WAVD meta-approaches for analyzing the artifacts. Our study’s results also summarized and compared the effectiveness and efficiency of different WAVD approaches on detecting specific categories of web application vulnerabilities and which web applications and test suites are used to evaluate the WAVD approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first SLR that focuses on summarizing the effectiveness and efficiencies of WAVD approaches. Our study results can help security engineers choose and compare WAVD tools and help researchers identify research gaps.

Survey on detecting and preventing web application broken access control attacks

“…Source code review plays a crucial role in detecting security flaws in software systems including BAC vulnerabilities. Studies (e.g., [20]- [22]) found that source code review while utilizing automated source code review tools can effectively detect multiple security issues categories including broken access control. These studies emphasize the importance of incorporating source code review into the software development life cycle to improve the security of the application and strengthen it against potential exploitations.…”

“…Security testing is one of the most effective and practical techniques for identifying vulnerabilities in software solutions including broken access control vulnerabilities. Studies (e.g., in [22]- [27]) found that security testing can effectively find BAC vulnerabilities as it analyzes the behavior of the running system and evaluates the implementation of access control policies and applied controls and security levels. Other studies [28] discussed the use of security testing in combination with code review alongside threat modeling to identify BAC vulnerabilities in web applications; nevertheless, studies emphasize the value of the usage of automated security testing tools for effective and automated detection of broken access control vulnerabilities as it can provide a thorough assessment and analysis of the target application and help identify issues that may be overlooked by manual testing.…”

SQL injection attack detection method based on textCNN

“…With the development of machine learning, it has also provided a new approach to SQL injection attack detection [8] . Joshi et al [9] proposed a SQL injection attack detection method that combines the naive Bayes algorithm with role-based access permissions.…”

Effectiveness of Security Through Obscurity Methods to Avoid Web Application Vulnerability Scanners

“…Pendekatan metode aplikasi pemindai kerentanan diklasifikasikan ke dalam analisis statis, analisis dinamis, white box, black box, taint analysis, pengujian penetrasi, pengujian fuzz, pengujian concolic, pengujian eksekusi simbolik, dan pemeriksaan model, sebagian besar diklasifikasikan pada pendekatan ke dalam tiga kategori, yaitu, statis, dinamis, dan hybrid [16]. Namun secara keseluruhan, pendekatan tersebut tidak lepas dari artefak (misalnya, Tag HTML, fungsi logika, variabel dalam kode sumber, permintaan HTTP, parameter GET/POST, dan nilai session atau cookie).…”