Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks and defense mechanisms: classification and state-of-the-art

Nowadays, web applications are becoming one of the standard platforms for representing data and service releases over the World Wide Web. Since web applications are progressively more utilized for security-critical services, therefore they have turned out to be a well-liked and precious target for the web-related vulnerabilities. Even though several defensive mechanisms have been building up to reinforce the modern web applications and alleviate the attacks instigated against them. We have analyzed the major concerns for web applications and Internet-based services which are persistent in several web applications of diverse organizations like banking, health care, financial service, retail and so on by the referring the Website Security Statistics Report of White Hat Security. In this paper, we highlight some of the serious vulnerabilities found in the modern web applications and revealed various serious vulnerabilities. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack is the top most vulnerability found in the today’s web applications which to be a plague for the modern web applications. XSS attacks permit an attacker to execute the malicious scripts on the victim’s web browser resulting in various side-effects such as data compromise, stealing of cookies, passwords, credit card numbers etc. We have also discussed a high level of taxonomy of XSS attacks and detailed incidences of these attacks on web applications. A detailed comprehensive analysis of the exploitation, detection and prevention mechanisms of XSS attacks has also been discussed. Based on explored strength and flaws of these mechanisms, we have discussed some further work. © 2015, The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden.