Evolutionary Multi-Task Injection Testing on Web Application Firewalls

Abstract

Web application firewall (WAF) plays an integral role nowadays to protect web applications from various malicious injection attacks such as SQL injection, XML injection, and PHP injection, to name a few. However, given the evolving sophistication of injection attacks and the increasing complexity of tuning a WAF, it is challenging to ensure that the WAF is free of injection vulnerabilities such that it will block all malicious injection attacks without wrongly affecting the legitimate message. Automatically testing the WAF is, therefore, a timely and essential task. In this paper, we propose DaNuoYi, an automatic injection testing tool that simultaneously generates test inputs for multiple types of injection attacks on a WAF. Our basic idea derives from the cross-lingual translation in the natural language processing domain. In particular, test inputs for different types of injection attacks are syntactically different but may be semantically similar. Sharing semantic knowledge across multiple programming languages can thus stimulate the generation of more sophisticated test inputs and discovering injection vulnerabilities of the WAF that are otherwise difficult to find. To this end, in DaNuoYi, we train several injection translation models by using multi-task learning that translates the test inputs between any pair of injection attacks. The model is then used by a novel multi-task evolutionary algorithm to co-evolve test inputs for different types of injection attacks facilitated by a shared mating pool and domain-specific mutation operators at each generation. We conduct experiments on three real-world open-source WAFs and six types of injection attacks, the results reveal that DaNuoYi generates up to 3.8× and 5.78× more valid test inputs (i.e., bypassing the underlying WAF) than its state-of-the-art single-task counterparts and the context-free grammar-based injection construction.