Xss Peeker: Dissecting The Xss Exploitation Techniques And Fuzzing Mechanisms Of Blackbox Web Application Scanners

Black-box vulnerability scanners can miss a non-negligible portion of vulnerabilities. This is true even for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, which are relatively simple to spot. In this paper, we focus on this vulnerability class, and systematically explore 6 black-box scanners to uncover how they detect XSS vulnerabilities, and obtain useful insights to understand their limitations and design better detection methods. A novelty of our workflow is the retrofitting of the testbed so as to accommodate payloads that triggered no vulnerabilities in the initial set. This has the benefit of creating a systematic process to increase the number of test cases, which was not considered by previous testbed-driven approaches.