Cross-site scripting (XSS) worms in Online Social Network (OSN): Taxonomy and defensive mechanisms

Abstract

The propagation of XSS worms on the social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. has observed exponential growth in modern era of Web 2.0 technology. According to recent survey, 43% of web applications are vulnerable to XSS worms. Such unbearable growth of XSS worms has raised some serious security and privacy concerns in OSN. This article discusses a detailed classification of XSS attacks and presents the recent occurrences of XSS attacks on numerous platforms of OSN-based web applications. Numerous existing XSS defensive solutions on OSN have been discussed in order to identify their main contributions and existing performance issues. We present the unique security challenges and issues that exist in the recent state-of-art techniques and based on this, we recommend the further scope.