Inferring Page Models for Web Application Analysis

Web applications are difficult to analyze using code-based tools because data-flow and control-flow through the application occurs via both server-side code and client-side pages. Client-side pages are typically specified in a scripting language that is different from the main server-side language; moreover, the pages are generated dynamically from the scripts. To address these issues we propose a static-analysis approach that automatically constructs a "model" of each page in a given application. A page model is a code fragment in the same language as the server-side code, which faithfully over-approximates the possible elements of the page as well as the control-flows and data-flows due to these elements. The server-side code in conjunction with the page models then becomes a standard (non-web) program, thus amenable to analysis using standard code-based tools.