System and method of web application discovery via capture and analysis of HTTP requests for external resources
AssigneeMcAfee, Inc.
InventorsBrett Oliphant, Ben Tyler, Gabriel Richard Pack, Brett Hardin
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method for discovering the structure, state transitions, and patterns of behavior of users of a web application includes a method for causing the web application to make HTTP requests for resources from an external supplier; capture of the requests for the external resources; extraction of meaningful data from the captured requests; and analysis to draw conclusions based on the extracted data. A system of invention provides a reference implementation of the method.
Claims20
A web application topology discovery method comprising:
- providing access to a trust mark from a server not under control of an owner of a web application, wherein references to the trust mark are embedded in content of the web application by the owner of the web application;
- receiving at the server one or more requests for the trust mark from one or more users of the web application, the requests being generated by the users' web browsers upon encountering the embedded references to the trust mark in the content of the web application;
- and
- inspecting the received requests to obtain information about the web application to be used as an input for a security scan.
A system for discovering topology of a web application, the system comprising:
- a store containing one or more trust marks;
- a server adapted to provide access to the one or more trust marks upon receiving requests from a user of the web application, each request being generated upon a user's encountering a reference to the trust mark embedded in the content of the web application by an owner of the web application;
- a request log adapted to store the received requests;
- and
- an analysis module adapted to inspect the received requests to obtain information about the web application to be used as an input for a security scan;
- wherein the system is not under control of an owner of the web application.
A web application topology discovery method comprising:
- providing access to a trust mark from a server not under control of an owner of a web application, wherein references to the trust mark, each reference including a uniform resource locator (URL), are embedded in content of the web application by the owner of the web application;
- receiving at the server one or more requests for the trust mark from one or more users of the web application, the requests being generated by the users' web browsers upon encountering the embedded references to the trust mark in the content of the web application, wherein each constructed request includes a referrer header containing the URL;
- and
- inspecting the received requests to obtain information about the web application to be used as an input for a security scan.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.