Andrea Avancini, Mariano Ceccato

Towards security testing with taint analysis and genetic algorithms


Abstract

Cross site scripting is considered the major threat to the security of web applications. Removing vulnerabilities from existing web applications is a manual expensive task that would benefit from some level of automatic assistance. Static analysis represents a valuable support for security review, by suggesting candidate vulnerable points to be checked manually. However, potential benefits are quite limited when too many false positives, safe portions of code classified as vulnerable, are reported.

In this paper, we present a preliminary investigation on the integration of static analysis with genetic algorithms. We show that this approach can suggest candidate false positives reported by static analysis and provide input vectors that expose actual vulnerabilities, to be used as test cases in security testing.

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Maintainer: ceccato at fbk dot eu