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PTDETECTOR: An Automated JavaScript Front-end Library Detector

  • SUNY Buffalo

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Identifying what front-end library runs on a web page is challenging. Although many mature detectors exist on the market, they suffer from false positives and the inability to detect libraries bundled by packers such as Webpack. Most importantly, the detection features they use are collected from developers' knowledge leading to an inefficient manual workflow and a large number of libraries that the existing detectors cannot detect. This paper introduces PTDETECTOR, which provides the first automated method for generating features and detecting libraries on web pages. We propose a novel data structure, the pTree, which we use as a detection feature. The pTree is well-suited for automation and addresses the limitations of existing detectors. We implement PTDETECTOR as a browser extension and test it on 200 top-traffic websites. Our experiments show that PTDETECTOR can identify packer-bundled libraries, and its detection results outperform existing tools.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2023
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages649-660
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9798350329964
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2023 - Echternach, Luxembourg
Duration: Sep 11 2023Sep 15 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2023

Conference

Conference38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2023
Country/TerritoryLuxembourg
CityEchternach
Period09/11/2309/15/23

Keywords

  • Front end
  • JavaScript
  • Library Detection
  • Web

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