Comparative Analysis of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerabilities in Monolith and Microservices Architectures
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54074/jicsa.v1i02.14Keywords:
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Monolith Architecture, MicroservicesAbstract
This study presents a comparative analysis of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities between monolithic and microservices web application architectures. Both applications were developed using Python Flask inside an isolated Docker environment and implemented with identical functionality. Security testing was conducted using automated scanning with OWASP ZAP on both architectures. The results show that Reflected XSS and Server-Side Template Injection (SSTI) vulnerabilities were detected in both architectures, with identical payloads successfully executed. These findings indicate that architectural separation alone does not automatically eliminate source-code-level vulnerabilities such as XSS. Security implementations must be consistently applied across all service layers to prevent data contamination and maintain trust boundaries between services.
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