Research and Implementation of Cross-site Scripting Defense Method Based on Moving Target Defense Technology

Abstract

The root cause of cross-site scripting(XSS) attack is that the JavaScript engine can’t distinguish between the JavaScript code in Web application and the JavaScript code injected by attackers. Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a novel technique that aim to defeat attacks by frequently changing the system configuration so that attackers can’t catch the status of the system. This paper describes the design and implement of a XSS defense method based on Moving Target Defense technology. This method adds a random attribute to each unsafe element in Web application to distinguish between the JavaScript code in Web application and the JavaScript code injected by attackers and uses a security check function to verify the random attribute, if there is no random attribute or the random attribute value is not correct in a HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) element, the execution of JavaScript code will be prevented. The experiment results show that the method can effectively prevent XSS attacks and have little impact on the system performance.