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A Quantitative Assessment of the Detection Performance of Web Vulnerability Scanners

Published: 23 August 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Software developers use web application vulnerability scanners to automatically identify security weaknesses in their web applications. The scanners inspect source code or analyze the running application, and look for specific vulnerability types. While it can be expected that a scanner will not discover every vulnerability, no information is available on the expected efficacy of currently available vulnerability scanners for a given vulnerability type. We present an analysis of 24 web vulnerability scanners and determine their effectiveness on 11 vulnerability types. Our study offers insights into the trade-offs when selecting a specific type of scanner. We show that for some vulnerability types, most vulnerability scanners perform poorly.

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  • (2024)Intelligent Platform for Automating Vulnerability Detection in Web ApplicationsElectronics10.3390/electronics1401007914:1(79)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2024

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  1. A Quantitative Assessment of the Detection Performance of Web Vulnerability Scanners

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ARES '22: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
    August 2022
    1371 pages
    ISBN:9781450396707
    DOI:10.1145/3538969
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 23 August 2022

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    Author Tags

    1. Vulnerability scanners
    2. Web applications
    3. Web vulnerabilities

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    • (2024)Intelligent Platform for Automating Vulnerability Detection in Web ApplicationsElectronics10.3390/electronics1401007914:1(79)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2024

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