Towards Improving Web Attack Detection: Highlighting the Significant Factors

Nowadays, with the rapid development of Internet, the use of Web is increasing and the Web applications have become a substantial part of people´s daily life (e.g. E-Government, E-Health and E-Learning), as they permit to seamlessly access and manage information. The main security concern for e-business is Web application security. Web applications have many vulnerabilities such as Injection, Broken Authentication and Session Management, and Cross-site scripting (XSS). Subsequently, web applications have become targets of hackers, and a lot of cyber attack began to emerge in order to block the services of these Web applications (Denial of Service Attach). Developers are not aware of these vulnerabilities and have no enough time to secure their applications. Therefore, there is a significant need to study and improve attack detection for web applications through determining the most significant factors for detection. To the best of our knowledge, there is not any research that summarizes the influent factors of detection web attacks. In this paper, the author studies state-of-the-art techniques and research related to web attack detection: the author analyses and compares different methods of web attack detections and summarizes the most important factors for Web attack detection independent of the type of vulnerabilities. At the end, the author gives recommendation to build a framework for web application protection.