PURITY: A Planning-based secURITY Testing Tool

Despite sophisticated defense mechanisms security testing still plays an important role in software engineering. Because of their latency, security flaws in web applications always bear the risk of being exploited sometimes in the future. In order to avoid potential damage, appropriate prevention measures should be incorporated in time and in the best case already during the software development cycle. In this paper, we contribute to this this goal and present the PURITY tool for testing web applications. PURITY executes test cases against a given website. It detects whether the website is vulnerable against some of the most common vulnerabilities, i.e., SQL injections and cross-site scripting. The goal is to resemble a malicious activity by following typical sequences of actions potentially leading to a vulnerable state. The test execution proceeds automatically. In contrast to other penetration testing tools, PURITY relies on planning. Concrete test cases are obtained from a plan, which in turn is generated from specific initial values and given actions. The latter are intended to mimic actions usually performed by an attacker. In addition, PURITY also allows a tester to configure input parameters and also tests a website in a manual manner.