Xiangyu Guo (University of Toronto), Akshay Kawlay (University of Toronto), Eric Liu (University of Toronto), David Lie (University of Toronto)

As more critical services move onto the web, it has become increasingly important to detect and address vulnerabilities in web applications. These vulnerabilities only occur under specific conditions: when 1) the vulnerable code is executed and 2) the web application is in the required state. If the application is not in the required state, then even if the vulnerable code is executed, the vulnerability may not be triggered. Previous work naively explores the application state by filling every field and triggering every JavaScript event before submitting HTML forms. However, this simplistic approach can fail to satisfy constraints between the web page elements, as well as input format constraints. To address this, we present EvoCrawl, a web crawler that uses evolutionary search to efficiently find different sequences of web interactions. EvoCrawl finds sequences that can successfully submit inputs to web applications and thus explore more code and server-side states than previous approaches. To assess the benefits of EvoCrawl we evaluate it against three state-of-the-art vulnerability scanners on ten web applications. We find that EvoCrawl achieves better code coverage due to its ability to execute code that can only be executed when the application is in a particular state. On average, EvoCrawl achieves a 59% increase in code coverage and successfully submits HTML forms 5x more frequently than the next best tool. By integrating IDOR and XSS vulnerability scanners, we used EvoCrawl to find eight zero-day IDOR and XSS vulnerabilities in WordPress, HotCRP, Kanboard, ImpressCMS, and GitLab.

View More Papers

Enhancing Security in Third-Party Library Reuse – Comprehensive Detection...

Shangzhi Xu (The University of New South Wales), Jialiang Dong (The University of New South Wales), Weiting Cai (Delft University of Technology), Juanru Li (Feiyu Tech), Arash Shaghaghi (The University of New South Wales), Nan Sun (The University of New South Wales), Siqi Ma (The University of New South Wales)

Read More

A Key-Driven Framework for Identity-Preserving Face Anonymization

Miaomiao Wang (Shanghai University), Guang Hua (Singapore Institute of Technology), Sheng Li (Fudan University), Guorui Feng (Shanghai University)

Read More

Understanding Influences on SMS Phishing Detection: User Behavior, Demographics,...

Daniel Timko (California State University San Marcos), Daniel Hernandez Castillo (California State University San Marcos), Muhammad Lutfor Rahman (California State University San Marcos)

Read More

Silence False Alarms: Identifying Anti-Reentrancy Patterns on Ethereum to...

Qiyang Song (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Heqing Huang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xiaoqi Jia (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Yuanbo Xie (Institute of Information…

Read More