Abstract
Detecting web application attacks is a task performed by many systems. An example of such a system is the open source tool NoScript, which will be discussed at various points in this work. Among these attacks, cross site scripting is a focus of this study, mainly due to the levels of concern related to it. The primary goal of this research is to analyze how efficiently a cross-site scripting attack once detected can be logged. Logging the attack has benefits from a Cyberforensics point of view. This work analyzes related efforts and the benefits of implementing such functionality. It was found that for the test system analyzed, there was an additional overhead. This overhead, though, was seen to be within acceptable limits defined in Usability Engineering literatures.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Marcus Rogers for his continued guidance. I would also like to thank my committee members Dr. Victor Raskin and Dr. Pascal Meunier for their guidance.
Thanks to Prof. Charles Killian, Keith Watson and Ed Finkler too, for their help with various aspects about programming languages and testing. I also extend my gratitude to Mr. Giorgio Maone, the creator of the open source Firefox extension – NoScript, for his valuable inputs on the working of the extension as well as on the test environment used in this work. I am grateful to a wonderful friend, Vikram, who has influenced me both technically and non-technically. I also thank all professors who taught me, my friends, colleagues and acquaintances at CERIAS, through whom I have learnt a lot about information security and life in general. Thanks to Sarath, Ashrith, Ankur, Preeti Rao, Pratik, Hina, Anurag, Utsav, Ashwin, Ryan, Preeti Rajendran, Guru, Marlene, Randy and Joel – your presence kept me going.
Keywords
Cyberforensics, Frequency analysis, Open source tools, Semantic analysis, Usability engineering, Web application security
