The Reconstruction of User-Interactions from HTTP traces for RIAs

Abstract

A user using a Web application generates HTTP traffic which can be captured and logged to be used for further analysis such as finding potential security holes. This document provides a method to reconstruct user-interactions from HTTP network traffic with a specific focus on RIAs. The only input provided is the full, unaltered HTTP network traffic of the original user-session. This thesis presents a system to replay HTTP trace for reconstructing the user-interactions using a programmable Web browser that is used to simulate user's actions and to execute client-side scripts. The experimental results show that the proposed solution in this thesis leads to a system which has a good performance in reconstructing user-interactions. The system performs an automated reconstruction of the user-interactions which reconstructs every DOM state that has been visited by the user during the user-session and the actions taken by the user, including user-inputs provided by the user.