An Evaluation of the Semantic Understanding Capabilities of Large Language Models for Web Attack Payloads

Abstract

Computer vision services delivered through Web interfaces and APIs process textual requests for image-resource acquisition, inference-task configuration, and result management, making Web attack-payload analysis relevant to their deployment security. Large language models (LLMs) can identify payload types and explain attack intent. However, existing studies generally treat payload analysis as a single-layer classification task and lack both a systematic assessment of how deeply LLMs understand payloads and an evaluation benchmark dedicated to the depth of semantic understanding of Web attack payloads. We construct PayloadSemBench, a four-layer semantic evaluation benchmark that operationalizes payload understanding across measurable tasks and comprises 240 payloads. Its ground truth was established through two rounds of anchor calibration and re-verified by a fourth independent expert. Two experiments, a semantic-understanding benchmark and an analysis mapping semantic understanding to detection performance, yielded three main findings: (1) type identification and intent understanding were generally strong, whereas severity assessment was the principal weakness; (2) the effects of obfuscation varied across models and layers, with intent explanation and reconstruction of specific obfuscation techniques more susceptible to degradation, while performance did not degrade synchronously across all layers; and (3) semantic understanding and detection decisions were partially decoupled, with only 12.5% to 50% of missed detections attributable to semantic-understanding failures. External re-evaluation on an independent 180-record dataset comprising production WAF alert streams and real application requests reproduced the non-uniform four-layer capability profile and the layer-specific differences on obfuscated payloads.