Fully Automated HTML and Javascript Rewriting for Constructing a Self-healing Web Proxy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-healing approach for web applications through automated HTML and Javascript rewriting, implemented in a proxy and a browser extension, to automatically repair front-end errors.

Contribution

It presents two novel tools, BikiniProxy and BugBlock, that use five self-healing strategies to automatically fix web page errors, improving web robustness.

Findings

BikiniProxy can automatically self-heal 31.76% of errors.

BugBlock can automatically self-heal 15.67% of errors.

The approach demonstrates effectiveness on a benchmark of 555 errors.

Abstract

Over the last few years, the complexity of web applications has increased to provide more dynamic web applications to users. The drawback of this complexity is the growing number of errors in the front-end applications. In this paper, we present an approach to provide self-healing for the web. We implemented this approach in two different tools: 1) BikiniProxy, an HTTP repair proxy, and 2) BugBlock, a browser extension. They use five self-healing strategies to rewrite the buggy HTML and Javascript code to handle errors in web pages. We evaluate BikiniProxy and BugBlock with a new benchmark of 555 reproducible Javascript errors of which 31.76% can be automatically self-healed by BikiniProxy and 15.67% by BugBlock.