Déjà Vu? Client-Side Fingerprinting and Version Detection of Web Application Software

Detection of outdated software components can help both administrators and IT security researchers to identify potential security risks. There exist several approaches to detect versions of web application software from the client-side. However, the existing solutions often require in-depth knowledge about each software, have high resource demands and use aggressive scanning techniques. In this work we present a novel approach which is able to build fingerprints automatically for different web applications using a passive scanning technique. Apart from hashes of asset files we also propose to use XPath profiling for the fingerprinting process, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been done in similar research before. Our evaluation with three widely used content management systems (CMS), namely Joomla, Drupal and TYPO3, shows that our approach can correctly detect the minor release of a web application for up to 95% of all versions.