Research Article
XHunter: Understanding XXE Vulnerability via Automatic Analysis
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-030-90022-9_2, author={Zhenhua Wang and Wei Xie and Jing Tao and Yong Tang and Enze Wang}, title={XHunter: Understanding XXE Vulnerability via Automatic Analysis}, proceedings={Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 17th EAI International Conference, SecureComm 2021, Virtual Event, September 6--9, 2021, Proceedings, Part II}, proceedings_a={SECURECOMM PART 2}, year={2021}, month={11}, keywords={Static analysis Web security XML external entity Vulnerability ranking}, doi={10.1007/978-3-030-90022-9_2} }- Zhenhua Wang
Wei Xie
Jing Tao
Yong Tang
Enze Wang
Year: 2021
XHunter: Understanding XXE Vulnerability via Automatic Analysis
SECURECOMM PART 2
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-90022-9_2
Abstract
XXE vulnerability is a severe cybersecurity threat. OWASP listed the 10 most serious web application security risks, and XXE ranked fourth. This vulnerability can lead to sensitive information leakage, DoS attacks, and intranet asset discovery. Little attention has been given to this problem, and manual work is still needed to detect these vulnerabilities. Here, we design a penetration test framework, XHunter, to discover and exploit XXE vulnerabilities automatically. XHunter can find the call chain that triggers a vulnerability and determine the vulnerability’s influence scope. Specifically, our work addresses many challenges in the analysis of modern web applications, such as object-oriented structures. In addition to detecting vulnerable sinks, we find the exploit path automatically. We give each vulnerability a risk rating based on the potential impact of the exploits. In this paper, we analyze 22 real-world web frameworks and find 8 unreported vulnerabilities, 2 of which have obtained CVE IDs.
