Book Image

Hands-On Application Penetration Testing with Burp Suite

By : Carlos A. Lozano, Dhruv Shah, Riyaz Ahemed Walikar
Book Image

Hands-On Application Penetration Testing with Burp Suite

By: Carlos A. Lozano, Dhruv Shah, Riyaz Ahemed Walikar

Overview of this book

Burp suite is a set of graphic tools focused towards penetration testing of web applications. Burp suite is widely used for web penetration testing by many security professionals for performing different web-level security tasks. The book starts by setting up the environment to begin an application penetration test. You will be able to configure the client and apply target whitelisting. You will also learn to setup and configure Android and IOS devices to work with Burp Suite. The book will explain how various features of Burp Suite can be used to detect various vulnerabilities as part of an application penetration test. Once detection is completed and the vulnerability is confirmed, you will be able to exploit a detected vulnerability using Burp Suite. The book will also covers advanced concepts like writing extensions and macros for Burp suite. Finally, you will discover various steps that are taken to identify the target, discover weaknesses in the authentication mechanism, and finally break the authentication implementation to gain access to the administrative console of the application. By the end of this book, you will be able to effectively perform end-to-end penetration testing with Burp Suite.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
12
Exploiting and Exfiltrating Data from a Large Shipping Corporation
Index

Brute forcing HTTP basic authentication


Basic authentication is a type of access control mostly used in internal environments to restrict access to restricted areas in a website. It has a lot of weaknesses, including the following:

  • The basic authentication sends the information in plain text. This means that a malicious user can intercept the information sent by the client to the server and extract the credentials.
  • The password is protected by a Base64 encoding. It does not mean that the password is encrypted; anyone can get the plain password using a decoder, like the one included in Burp Suite, as shown in the following screenshot:
  • The credentials are cached by the web browser.
  • The credentials are stored in the web browser, and they are sent in each request. Growing the probability to be stolen by a malicious user using a men in the middle (MITM) attack.

Despite all of these security issues, the basic authentication is still commonly used. For example, a lot of network devices use it as access...