Stephen is a web developer in the InterCall Systems.

To mitigate the XSS vulnerability on the search page, Stephen should encode the user input before it is output to the browser. This can be done using the ESAPI (Enterprise Security API) encoder, which is a collection of utilities designed to help developers defend against security vulnerabilities such as XSS.

The correct code snippet would be:

Java

out.Write("You Searched for: " + ESAPI.encoder().encodeForHTML(request.getParameter("txt_Search")));

AI-generated code. Review and use carefully. More info on FAQ.

This code ensures that any HTML special characters in the user input are properly encoded, preventing them from being executed as part of the HTML markup. For example, if a user enters a script tag, it will be encoded and displayed as plain text rather than executed.

References:For further details, please refer to the EC-Council’s Certified Application Security Engineer (CASE) JAVA courses and study guides, which provide guidelines on secure coding practices, including input validation and output encoding strategies12. Additionally, the OWASP XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet offers comprehensive steps to prevent XSS vulnerabilities2.