Form filling based on constraint solving

Abstract

We describe a system for analyzing form-based websites to discover sequences of actions and values that result in a valid form submission. Rather than looking at the text or DOM structure of the form, our method is driven by solving constraints involving the underlying client-side JavaScript code. In order to deal with the complexity of client-side code, we adapt a method from program analysis and testing, concolic testing, which mixes concrete code execution, symbolic code tracing, and constraint solving to find values that lead to new code paths. While concolic testing is commonly used for detecting bugs in stand-alone code with developer support, we show how it can be applied to the very different problem of filling Web forms. We evaluate our system on a benchmark of both real and synthetic Web forms.