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Penetration Testing for Websites using LLM

Authors

Dr. Vilas S. Gaikwad

Dept. of Information Technology Trinity College of Engineering and Research (IN)

Soham Deshmukh

Dept. of Information Technology Trinity College of Engineering and Research (IN)

Mohanish Kulkarni

Dept. of Information Technology Trinity College of Engineering and Research (IN)

Pallavi Akolkar

Dept. of Information Technology Trinity College of Engineering and Research (IN)

Jayam Mehta

Dept. of Information Technology Trinity College of Engineering and Research (IN)

Article Information

DOI: 10.51583/IJLTEMAS.2026.150500244

Subject Category: Artificial Intelligence & CyberSecurity

Volume/Issue: 15/5 | Page No: 3014-3026

Publication Timeline

Submitted: 2026-06-22

Published: 2026-06-22

Abstract

Despite growing interest in applying Large Lan-guage Models (LLMs) to security assessment, existing prototype systems rarely provide controlled benchmarks, reproducible ar-tifacts, significance testing, or structured human evaluation. We introduce a reproducible, safety-bounded LLM-augmented web assessment framework that layers an LLM reasoning module atop conventional scanners to perform context-aware triage, con-strained payload proposal, evidence-grounded response analysis, false-alarm suppression, and actionable fix guidance. Empirical evaluation across WebGoat v2023.4, DVWA v1.9, bWAPP v2.2, and five authorized staging replicas of disclosed targets — spanning 1,247 endpoints and 462 labeled ground-truth flaws shows that the proposed approach raises micro-averaged F1 from 0.58 to 0.82 over scanner-only baselines, lowers the false-alarm rate from 23.4% to 7.2% (McNemar p<0.001), and shortens analyst review time by 43%, from 47 to 27 minutes per engagement (Wilcoxon p=0.008). Over 2,500 test executions, the safety layer blocked every destructive candidate payload with zero unsafe executions. A structured 10-person evaluation with five security practitioners and five application developers con-firmed statistically significant improvements in comprehension speed, report clarity, and remediation actionability (p<0.01).

Keywords

Large Language Models, web penetration test-ing, vulnerability assessment, OWASP, CWE, reproducibility, statistical evaluation

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References

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