Web Application Security Scanner URI Subset Selection
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Solution Overview
Problem
Web application security scanning faces challenges in efficiently identifying vulnerabilities and false positives, particularly in complex applications with unbounded response modes, where automated testing struggles to cover all possible inputs within reasonable time and may miss true positives due to excessive false alarms.
Innovation Solution
A method involving a web application security scanner that determines common Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and selects a subset of them using a semi-random skipping process to perform a security scan, ensuring a more distributed sampling and reducing the burden of testing complex web applications.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a comprehensive security scan is performed on all URIs of a web application, then vulnerability detection coverage is improved, but scan time and computational resources increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the complete set of URIs into multiple subsets and performs scans on different subsets across multiple iterations. This segmentation allows the scanning process to divide the large task of scanning all URIs into smaller, manageable portions, reducing the time required for each individual scan while maintaining comprehensive coverage over multiple iterations.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs partial scanning by selecting and scanning only a subset of URIs in each iteration rather than scanning all URIs comprehensively in each run. This partial action approach reduces the time and resources required per scan while still achieving good vulnerability detection coverage when multiple iterations are performed with different subsets.
2Ease of manufacture
If all URIs are scanned in the order they are generated, then the scanning process is simple to implement, but the sampling distribution is biased and may miss important vulnerabilities
Solution Approach 1:
The patent inverts the conventional approach of scanning URIs in their generated order by instead selecting subsets of URIs in reverse or shuffled order. This inversion of the scanning sequence helps eliminate the bias inherent in sequential scanning and improves the distribution quality of the sampling, ensuring more diverse and representative vulnerability detection.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces dynamic subset selection where the URIs to be scanned are selected dynamically through shuffling or randomization rather than following a fixed sequential order. This dynamic approach adapts the scanning sequence to provide better sampling distribution while maintaining implementation feasibility through algorithmic randomization.
3Reliability
If the scanner processes every response from the web application, then complete vulnerability coverage is achieved, but false positives increase due to unbounded response modes
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and removes certain responses from the complete set of web application responses before analysis. By taking out and excluding specific response types that are known to generate false positives or are unrelated to security vulnerabilities, the system reduces the number of false alarms while maintaining detection of genuine security issues.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies different processing qualities to different responses based on their characteristics. Instead of uniformly analyzing all responses, the system applies selective analysis where certain responses are examined in detail while others are excluded or given different levels of scrutiny, improving the signal-to-noise ratio and reducing false positives.
Data Source
AI summary
A method of testing a web application, wherein a web application is a program that operates on a server and interacts with clients that access the program over a network, wherein further the web application accepts parameters that define results generated from the web application, the method comprising determining which web application uniform resource identifiers (URIs) are used to access various web applications on a system, determining if more than a threshold of the URIs are for a common web application, selecting a subset of less than all of the URIs for the common web application when the threshold is exceeded for that common web application, wherein the subset is selected at least in part independently of the order generated and performing a security scan on the selected subset.