Detection, Avoidance, and Attack Pattern Mechanisms in Modern Web Application Vulnerabilities: Present and Future Challenges

Motivation

Now-a-days, large multinational corporations depend on the web application to extend and span their business comprising public sector, banking sector, e-commerce, IT sector, etc. All these web applications are built using advanced web technologies like AJAX, JavaScript and are hosted by the cloud servers. While, these are crucial for the business, but at the same time, they are also vulnerable to the various types of cyber-attacks. Consequently, it leads to the reputation damage, loss of sensitive information, financial loss, etc. Figure 1 illustrates the percentage of web application system developed using different programming languages as reported by the Web Application Vulnerability Statistics (2013) (Web application Vulnerability statistics, 2013). It is stated by the report that PHP and Java are the most popular web application development technologies. ‘Other’ category may include less popular languages like perl, python, etc.

Figure 1.

Percentage of web application developed by using different programming language platforms

There are several vulnerabilities that have infected a large number of web applications of almost every field. Figure 2 shows the statistics for these vulnerabilities that are commonly found in the web applications as reported by the White Hat Security (2015) (White Hat, 2015).