Open Access

ARTICLE

Systematic Approach for Web Protection Runtime Tools’ Effectiveness Analysis

by Tomás Sureda Riera^1,*, Juan Ramón Bermejo Higuera², Javier Bermejo Higuera², Juan Antonio Sicilia Montalvo², José Javier Martínez Herráiz¹

1 Computer Science Department, University of Alcalá, Madrid, 28801, Spain
2 Escuela Superior de Ingeniería y Tecnología, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Logroño, 26006, Spain

* Corresponding Author: Tomás Sureda Riera. Email:

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2022, 133(3), 579-599. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2022.020976

Received 22 December 2021; Accepted 09 March 2022; Issue published 03 August 2022

Abstract

Web applications represent one of the principal vehicles by which attackers gain access to an organization’s network or resources. Thus, different approaches to protect web applications have been proposed to date. Of them, the two major approaches areWeb Application Firewalls (WAF) and Runtime Application Self Protection (RASP). It is, thus, essential to understand the differences and relative effectiveness of both these approaches for effective decisionmaking regarding the security of web applications. Here we present a comparative study between WAF and RASP simulated settings, with the aim to compare their effectiveness and efficiency against different categories of attacks. For this, we used computation of different metrics and sorted their results using F-Score index. We found that RASP tools scored better than WAF tools. In this study, we also developed a new experimental methodology for the objective evaluation of web protection tools since, to the best of our knowledge, no method specifically evaluates web protection tools.

---

Keywords

---