Developing a Methodology for Web Applications Vulnerabilities Analysis and Detection
Mohamad Ahmad Swead1, Muhammad Mazen Almustafa2
1Mohamad Ahmad Swead, Web Sciences, Syrian Virtual University, Syria.
2Muhammad Mazen Almustafa, Web Sciences, Syrian Virtual University, Syria.
Manuscript received on 07 March 2019 | Revised Manuscript received on 20 March 2019 | Manuscript published on 30 March 2019 | PP: 432-438 | Volume-8 Issue-5, March 2019 | Retrieval Number: E3047038519/19©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: Background. Recently, web applications have proliferated rapidly, with the world increasingly dependent on financial transactions, purchasing, billing, education, medicine, and many more. But the security of these applications is worrying where any vulnerability might lead to breaches causing huge damages. In order to increase the security of these applications towards injection attacks, developers have followed a series of procedures, one of them is encrypting parameters and data before sending it. Decrypting these parameters gives attackers opportunities to target web application by launching injection attacks. We have developed a methodology to detect injection vulnerabilities by trying to decrypt hidden parameters which encrypted using MD5, SHA1, SHA2, AES. Methods. In order to implement the proposed methodology, a scanner called DEHP has been developed, DEHP employ a black-box approach to analyze targeted web applications. DEHP is using traditional crawlers to crawl and collect all URLs included in that application and for each single URL does the following steps: analyzing HTML syntax, extracting input parameters which its type is hidden, checking if these parameters’ value is encrypted or not, if it’s encrypted DEHP launching one of two types of attacks, dictionary or brute-force attack depending on user selection to try decrypt of hidden parameter value, DEHP is also checking Cross-Site scripting vulnerabilities by analyzing JavaScript syntax looking for commands related to interaction with the database, checking SQL injection blind vulnerabilities by launching attack towards input nodes (Username, Password), checking HTTP header type and date and finally checking digital certificate of HTTPS connections to make sure of its validity. DEHP has been developed under Visual Studio 2017 environment using C# and ASP .NET framework. Results. DEHP has been tested towards many web applications taking into consideration laws governing for such applications. Crawling speed was very good due to use traditional crawlers, detecting vulnerabilities speed was good using a dictionary attack (the database needs to be extended), by using brute-force attack speed was bad due to miss a suitable test bed and resources for such type of attacks. Results of DEHP were compared with similar open-source applications but none of them care about decryption of encrypted hidden parameters.
Keyword: Vulnerability, SQL Injection, Encryption, Crawler, Threats, XSS, Assessment tools.
Scope of the Article: Internet and Web Applications