Online Transaction Security Risk Management for E-commerce Web Applications

In Current scenario, many Web applications go through rapid development phases like adopting agile methodology of development with very short turnaround time, making it difficult to identify and eliminate vulnerabilities. This paper provides analysis of requirement of Secure Development and Web application security assessment mechanisms in order to identify poor coding practices that render Web applications vulnerable to attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. This paper also list out the different categories of vulnerability with the small examples along with prevention guidance and a sample of research by different vendors about the State of Software Security Report and Web Application Vulnerability Statistics of 2012. This paper reviews need of secure development, resource s available for creating secure Web applications. These resources ranges from the security features of the development, to automated tools evaluating an existing Web application, to Web sites dedicated to all facets of Web application security. In Web application security, making one single mistake can lead to many unwanted flaws. By using the different resources available, the risk of the applications to be vulnerable can be reduced to an acceptable level. In addition, some risk can be avoided at the very beginning of the project life cycle when the requirements for the system are defined.

In current information era, every small-scale industry, MNC's, Schools, and Colleges utilise Web Applications to promote their organizations and provide services to society. Web Applications have become a simple and vital medium for communicating with society. This leads to an increase in website utilization. Threats and cyber-attacks are increasing according to the rate of growth of Web Applications. Any organization must ensure the privacy and security of its users' data in order to maintain the company's and users' integrity. Web application vulnerabilities represent major security risks, making it critical to conduct extensive assessments and penetration testing to discover and remediate such flaws. The paper provides a complete overview of web application vulnerability assessment and penetration testing, emphasizing the need of proactive security measures in protecting sensitive data and preserving application integrity. This study aims to identify and categorize web application vulnerabilities (OWASPs) that may compromise the security of the application and result in user data breaches. The primary focus of this project is the security and privacy of user data. Integrating security practices into the software development life cycle through investigating real-world case studies and industry standards. Ultimately, our research adds to the growing body of knowledge in web application security, assisting organizations in creating resilient defenses against cyber threats.

Web applications are frequent targets of attack due to their widespread use and round the clock availability. Malicious users can exploit vulnerabilities in web applications to steal sensitive information, modify and destroy data as well as deface web applications. The process of exploiting web applications is a multi-step process and the first step in an attack is reconnaissance, in which the attacker tries to gather information about the target web application. In this step, the attacker uses highly efficient automated scanning tools to scan web applications. Following reconnaissance, the attacker proceeds to vulnerability scanning and subsequently attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities discovered to compromise the web application. Detection of reconnaissance scans by malicious users can be combined with other traditional intrusion detection and prevention systems to improve the security of web applications. In this paper, a method for detecting reconnaissance scans through analysis of web server access logs is proposed. The proposed approach uses an LSTM network based deep learning approach for detecting reconnaissance scans. Experiments conducted show that the proposed approach achieves a mean precision, recall and f1-score of 0.99 over three data sets and precision, recall and f1-score of 0.97, 0.96 and 0.96 over the combined dataset.

Strong security in web applications is critical to the success of your online presence. Security importance has grown massively, especially among web applications. Dealing with web application or website security issues requires deep insight and planning, not only because of the many tools that are available but also because of the industry immaturity. Thus, finding the proper tools requires deep understanding and several steps, including analyzing the development environment, business needs, and the web applications’ complexity. In this paper, we demonstrate the architecture of web applications then list and evaluate the widespread security vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities are: Fingerprinting, Insufficient Transport Layer Protection, Information Leakage, Cross-Site Scripting, SQL Injection, and HTTP Splitting. In addition, this paper analyzes the tools that are used to scan for these widespread vulnerabilities in web applications. Finally, it evaluates tools due to security vulnerabilities and gives recommendations to the web applications’ users and administrators aiming to educate them.

In modern advertisements, clickjacking attacks can be delivered through a vulnerability in web application. To overcome this, web application security is required that will prevent malvertisement. In this study, prevention of clickjacking in the modern web advertisements are implemented. Vulnerability checks on the potentially malicious website were conducted. Implementation of hybrid prevention method of clickjacking into new developed website were carried out. Among top 500 websites, 50 websites were chosen as a dataset in this study out of which 4 case studies were selected. Website with server privileges were required to implement the hybrid prevention method, consisting opacity, Z-Index and X-Frame option policy. A new website was developed to satisfy the requirements for the method implementation. The results show, among 50 selected websites, about 19 websites were vulnerable to clickjacking. When the hybrid prevention method were implemented in the developed website, it increases the security by mitigating the vulnerability of web application to clickjacking attack.

Web application development is error prone and results in applications that are vulnerable to attacks by malicious users. The global accessibility of Web applications makes this an extremely serious problem. According to the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)’s top ten list that identifies the most serious web application vulnerabilities, the top three vulnerabilities in 2007 [84] were: (1) Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and (2) Injection Flaws (such as SQL Injection). Even after it has been widely reported that web applications suffer from these vulnerabilities, XSS and SQL Injection vulnerabilities remained among the top three vulnerabilities listed in OWASP’s top ten list in 2010 [85] and 2013 [86].

Internet has been dominating the world nearly a decade. Web application is known to be the most widespread platform of the internet especially when it comes to share resources, e-commerce services, education and business platforms. Since the usage of web applications are increasing dramatically, it’s becoming more vulnerable for security attacks. Each year, organizations facing many security attacks towards their web applications. Although many security practices and mitigations have been applying in web application, however there are still some security loophole issues can be found in web application. For instance, these loopholes can be referred as lack of secure coding (standards) implemented in web application, lack of formal security training approach for web developers and improper security testing for their web application. Besides, social engineering attacks also tremendously increasing each year. Many organizations were compromised through phishing attacks due to lack of awareness among users (employees). As a solution to overcome the issues, a research project will be carried out to implement a system called Nscanner to detect Structured Query Language injection (SQLi) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities for web application. Moreover, the developer also will design a malware detection feature based on machine learning approach to detect malware found in attachments from emails in order to prevent malware phishing attacks.

- In an era where web applications are increasingly targeted by sophisticated cyber threats, ensuring robust and continuous security testing has become essential. This paper presents Autopen Test, a real-time automated framework designed to identify and assess vulnerabilities in web applications with minimal human intervention. Autopen Test integrates dynamic analysis, intelligent crawling, and adaptive scanning techniques to detect common and complex security flaws such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and insecure configurations. By leveraging automation and real-time feedback mechanisms, the framework provides immediate insights into potential threats, significantly reducing the time between vulnerability discovery and mitigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate Autopen Test’s effectiveness and efficiency compared to existing tools, showcasing its potential as a valuable asset in modern DevSecOps pipelines. This research contributes a scalable and extensible solution to the field of web application security, emphasizing the importance of real-time, automated approaches in proactive vulnerability management. Key Words: Web Application Security, Automated Vulnerability Assessment, Real-Time Scanning, Autopen Test, Dynamic Analysis, Intelligent Crawling, Adaptive Scanning, SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). DevSecOps.

Dynamic Web applications, such as e-commerce Web application, extensively use databases as backend servers. These Web applications are highly dependent on the efficiency with which the Web databases can be accessed. A dynamic Web page consists of many small fragments of scripting languages, called Web views, which may require access to data in disparate databases. These Web views when materialized can enhance the efficiency of database access. An e-commerce Web application has large number of users involved in various personalized interactive activities. These generate a stream of Web page accesses and modification requests that necessitate taking dynamic decisions for selecting Web views for materialization, which minimize the average access time of Web views. In this paper, a Web view selection algorithm (WVSA) that selects Web views for materialization is proposed. Experimental results suggest that materializing Web views using WVSA increases the efficiency of Web view accesses.

Attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in web applications to commit malicious acts such as corrupting application functionality and Trojan horse implantation. For injection vulnerabilities in Web applications, existing methods are limited by the variety of programming languages and the difficulty in extracting semantic information to detect complex vulnerabilities. The paper proposes a pattern matching-based method for identifying injection vulnerabilities in Web applications, which transforms vulnerability identification into path matching in graphical databases by modifying the code property graph to enable it to handle more complex inter-functional relationships in Web applications. In this paper, we designed and implemented a prototype system, VulnFinder. By collecting 100 randomly selected Github high star open-source projects as the dataset for performance testing, we found 262 real vulnerabilities and conducted comparison experiments with static scanning tools RIPS and Cobra, VulnFinder far exceeded the comparison tools in terms of vulnerability determination accuracy, and in terms of the dataset VulnFinder was 94% accurate in determining vulnerabilities in the dataset. In scanning large projects, VulnFinder was approximately 21% more efficient than the comparable methodology tool RIPS.

Today almost all organizations have changed their traditional systems and have improved their performance using web-based applications. This process will make more profit and at the same time will increase the efficiency of their activities through customer support services and data transactions. Usually, web application take inputs from users through web form and send this input to get the response from database. Modern web-based application use web database to store all critical information such as user credentials, financial and payment information, company statistics etc. However error in validation of user input can cause database vulnerable to Structured Query Language Injection (SQLI) attack. By using SQLI attack, the attackers might insert malicious code in the user input and trying to gain access to the confidential and sensitive data from database. Security tester need to identify the appropriate test cases before starting exploiting SQL vulnerability in web-based application during testing phase. Identifying the test cases of a web application and analyzing the test results of an attack are important parts and consider as critical issues that affects the effectiveness of security testing. Thus, this research focused on the developing a framework for testing and detecting SQL injection vulnerability in web application. In this research, test cases will be generated automatically based on SQLI attack pattern and then the results will be executed automatically based on generated test cases. The primary focus in this paper is to develop a framework to automate security testing based on input injection attack pattern. To test our framework, we install a vulnerable web application and test result shows that the proposed framework can detect SQLI vulnerability successfully.

Web applications make life more convenient. Many web applications have several kinds of user input (e.g. personal information, a user"s comment of commercial goods, etc.) for the activities. On the other hand, there are a range of vulnerabilities in the input functions of Web applications. Malicious actions can be attempted using the free accessibility of many web applications. Attacks by the exploitation of these input vulnerabilities can be achieved by injecting malicious web code; it enables one to perform a variety of illegal actions, such as SQL Injection Attacks (SQLIAs) and Cross Site Scripting (XSS). These actions come down to theft, replacing personal information, or phishing. The existing solutions use a parser for the code, are limited to fixed and very small patterns, and are difficult to adapt to variations. A machine learning method can give leverage to cover a far broader range of malicious web code and is easy to adapt to variations and changes. Therefore, this paper suggests the adaptable classification of malicious web code by machine learning approaches for detecting the exploitation user inputs. The approach usually identifies the “looks-like malicious” code for real malicious code. More detailed classification using sequence information is also introduced. The precision for the “looks-like malicious code” is 99% and for the precise classification with sequence is 90%.

In most cases, web applications communicate with web services (SOAP and RESTful). The former act as a front-end to the latter, which contain the business logic. A hacker might not have direct access to those web services (e.g., they are not on public networks), but can still provide malicious inputs to the web application, thus potentially compromising related services. Typical examples are XML injection attacks that target SOAP communications. In this paper, we present a novel, search-based approach used to generate test data for a web application in an attempt to deliver malicious XML messages to web services. Our goal is thus to detect XML injection vulnerabilities in web applications. The proposed approach is evaluated on two studies, including an industrial web application with millions of users. Results show that we are able to effectively generate test data (e.g., input values in an HTML form) that detect such vulnerabilities.

Mobile applications use Accessibility Services to assist users with disabilities (UWDs) in using Graphical User Interface (GUI)-based apps. However, such mobile assistive technologies are not fully secure as these can obtain data from the GUI objects, enhance this data for UWDs and transmit it to a server, thereby potentially exposing sensitive data to the external world. SEAPHISH (SEcuring Accessibility using PHISHing) is a platform aimed towards protecting against such an attack by providing defense by deception. This platform generates a phishing app i.e. an app similar to the original app installed on the user’s smartphone by extracting GUI elements and properties from the original app. A simulation for SEAPHISH can help determine the situations when an attack against a particular app can be performed with a high degree of probability. But performing effective simulations requires a fundamental understanding of the properties of GUI layouts of apps at large. This thesis aims at providing a framework that analyzes GUI layouts and their transitions using a large base of approximately three million Android apps. Various state-of-the-art tools that use different strategies in traversing layouts are explored. We created a framework where the tool Backstage performs static analysis and another tool AndroidRipper performs dynamic analysis of the layouts to help build a GUI model of the app. Using these models, we investigate the layouts of Android apps by collecting statistics on various GUI elements and screens. This investigation enhances SEAPHISH with statistically significant real-world constraints thereby providing defense against malwares and reducing the security vulnerabilities faced by UWDs.

Although no single tool or technique can guard against the host of possible attacks, a defense-in-depth approach, with overlapping protections, can help secure Web applications.