Cross-Site Scripting Guardian: A Static XSS Detector Based on Data Stream Input-Output Association Mining

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 10; no. 14
• Main Authors: Li, Chenghao, Wang, Yiding, Miao, Changwei, Huang, Cheng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 15.07.2020
• Subjects: Accounting and auditing; Anti-virus software; Data mining; Machine learning; Methods; PHP; Safety and security measures; Source code; Web applications; China
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/appl0144740

The largest number of cybersecurity attacks is on web applications, in which Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is the most popular way. The code audit is the main method to avoid the damage of XSS at the source code level. However, there are numerous limits implementing manual audits and rule-based audit tools. In the age of big data, it is a new research field to assist the manual auditing through machine learning. In this paper, we propose a new way to audit the XSS vulnerability in PHP source code snippets based on a PHP code parsing tool and the machine learning algorithm. We analyzed the operation sequence of source code and built a model to acquire the information that is most closely related to the XSS attack in the data stream. The method proposed can significantly improve the recall rate of vulnerability samples. Compared with related audit methods, our method has high reusability and excellent performance. Our classification model achieved an FI score of 0.92, a recall rate of 0.98 (vulnerable sample), and an area under curve (AUC) of 0.97 on the test dataset. Keywords: vulnerability detection; code audit; cross-site scripting; machine learning