Mining SQL injection and cross site scripting vulnerabilities using hybrid program analysis

Abstract—In previous work, we proposed a set of static attributes that characterize input validation and input sanitization code patterns. We showed that some of the proposed static attributes are significant predictors of web application vulnerabilities related to SQL injection and cross site scripting. Static attributes have the advantage of reflecting general properties of a program. Yet, dynamic attributes collected from execution traces may reflect more specific code characteristics that are complementary to static attributes. Hence, to improve our initial work, in this paper, we propose the use of dynamic attributes to complement static attributes in the prediction of vulnerabilities. Furthermore, since existing work relies on supervised learning, it is dependent on the availability of training data labeled with known vulnerabilities. This paper presents prediction models that are based on both classification and clustering in order to predict vulnerabilities, working in the presence or absence of labeled training data, respectively. In our experiments across six applications, our new supervised vulnerability predictors based on hybrid (static and dynamic) attributes achieved, on average, 90 % recall and 85 % precision, that is a sharp increase in recall when compared to static analysis-based predictions. Though not nearly as accurate, our unsupervised predictors based on clustering achieved, on average, 76 % recall and 39 % precision, thus suggesting they can be useful in the absence of labeled training data. Index Terms—Defect prediction, vulnerability, input validation and sanitization, static and dynamic analysis, empirical study. I.