Web Application Security Vulnerabilities Detection Approaches: a Systematic Mapping Study

Number of security vulnerabilities in web application has grown with the tremendous growth of web application in last two decades. As the domain of Web Applications is maturing, large number of empirical studies has been reported in web applications to address the solution of vulnerable web application. However, before advancing towards finding new approaches of web applications security vulnerability detection, there is a need to analyze and synthesize existing evidence based studies in web applications area. To do this, we have planned to conduct a systematic mapping study to view and report the state-of-the-art of empirical work in existing research of web applications. In this paper, we aimed at providing a description of mapping study for synthesizing the reported empirical research in the area of web applications security vulnerabilities detection approaches. The proposed solutions are mapped against: (1) the software development stages for which the solution has been proposed and (2) the web application vulnerabilities mapping according to OWASP Top 10 security vulnerabilities. To do this, existing literature has been surveyed using a systematic mapping study by phrasing two research questions. In the mapping study, a total of 41 studies dating from 1994 to 2014 were evaluated and mapped against the aforementioned categories. The outcome of this mapping study is current state-of-the-art of empirical research in web application area, strength and weaknesses of existing empirical work, best practices and possible directions for future research.