Performance Evaluation of Web Application Security Scanners for More Effective Defense
With more and more people becoming Internet users there have been great increase in using Web in all areas of life, including communication, education and shopping. And as a result of these changes the security concerns have also grown. The web application vulnerability scanners help reduce these security concerns in Web based applications. In today's market a large number of web scanners are available. Although these tools are available in the market but question is how efficient they are to address security concerns in WEB applications? The primary objective of the paper is to study the effectiveness of the scanners and to try to identify common types of vulnerabilities in web services environment. Also, one of the prominent objectives is to provide defense measures, which secure the application significantly. To compare vulnerability detection rate of different scanners, it is important to have an independent test suite. This paper describes a web application, which is intended to be used to evaluate the efficiency of Netsparker and Acunetix web application vulnerability scanners. For several vulnerabilities presented in this application, we also explain defense measures, which secure the application significantly. The results of web application evaluation identify the most challenging vulnerabilities for scanner to detect, and compare the effectiveness of scanners. The assessment results can suggest areas that require further research to improve scanner's detection rate.