Finding your way in the testing jungle: a learning approach to web security testing
Omer Tripp, Omri Weisman, Lotem Guy · 2013
Black-box security testing of web applications is a hard problem. The main complication lies in the black-box assumption: The testing tool has limited insight into the workings of server-side defenses. This has traditionally led commercial as well as research vulnerability scanners toward heuristic approaches, such as testing each input point (e.g. HTTP parameter) with a short, predefined list of effective test payloads to balance between coverage and performance.