Cross-site scripting detection with two-channel feature fusion embedded in self-attention mechanism. Issue 124 (January 2023)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hu, Tianle; Xu, Chonghai; Zhang, Shenwen; Tao, Shuangshuang; Li, Luqun
• Is Part Of: Computers & security. Issue 124(2023)
• Publication Date: 2023-01
• Subjects: Cross-site scripting -- Word2Vec -- Feature fusion -- Bidirectional long-short term memory -- Self-attention mechanism; Computer security -- Periodicals; Electronic data processing departments -- Security measures -- Periodicals; 005.805
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2022.102990
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0167-4048

Abstract

Abstract: In the era of big data, stealing users' private data has become one of the main targets of network hackers. In recent years, cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks to obtain users' privacy data have been one of the main web attack methods of network hackers. Traditional antivirus software cannot identify such cross-site scripting attacks. To identify cross-site scripting attacks quickly and accurately, we proposed a cross-site scripting detection model (C-BLA) with two-channel multi-scale feature fusion embedded in a self-attention mechanism. The model first maps cross-site scripting payloads into spatial vectors by data preprocessing using Word2Vec. Then the two-channel network performs feature extraction on the data. Channel I: extract local features of cross-site scripting payloads at different scales by designing parallel one-dimensional convolutional layers with different convolutional kernel sizes; Channel II: extract semantic information of cross-site scripting payloads from two directions of positive and negative order using a bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory network, and then embed the self-attention mechanism to strengthen the semantic information features. Experiments show that the proposed model achieves a precision rate of 99.8 % and a recall rate of 99.1 % for cross-site scripting detection, which is a certain improvement in detection rate compared with a single deep learning model and traditional machine learning methods. The two-channel feature fusion of this model better solves the cross-site scripting detection problem.