Combinatorial method with static analysis for source code security in web applications

Abstract

Security weaknesses in web applications deployed in cloud architectures can seriously affect its data confidentiality and integrity. The construction of the procedure utilized in the static analysis tools of source code security differs and therefore each tool finds a different number of each weakness type for which it is designed. To utilize the possible synergies different static analysis tools may process, this work uses a new method to combine several source codes aiming to investigate how to increase the performance of security weakness detection while reducing the number of false positives. Specifically, five static analysis tools will be combined with the designed method to study their behavior using an updated benchmark for OWASP Top Ten Security Weaknesses (OWASP TTSW). The method selects specific metrics to rank the tools for different criticality levels of web applications considering different weights in the ratios. The findings show that simply including more tools in a combination is not synonymous with better results; it depends on the specific tools included in the combination due to their different designs and techniques.