Book Image

Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook

By : Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez
Book Image

Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook

By: Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez

Overview of this book

Web applications are a huge point of attack for malicious hackers and a critical area for security professionals and penetration testers to lock down and secure. Kali Linux is a Linux-based penetration testing platform and operating system that provides a huge array of testing tools, many of which can be used specifically to execute web penetration testing. This book will teach you, in the form step-by-step recipes, how to detect a wide array of vulnerabilities, exploit them to analyze their consequences, and ultimately buffer attackable surfaces so applications are more secure, for you and your users. Starting from the setup of a testing laboratory, this book will give you the skills you need to cover every stage of a penetration test: from gathering information about the system and the application to identifying vulnerabilities through manual testing and the use of vulnerability scanners to both basic and advanced exploitation techniques that may lead to a full system compromise. Finally, we will put this into the context of OWASP and the top 10 web application vulnerabilities you are most likely to encounter, equipping you with the ability to combat them effectively. By the end of the book, you will have the required skills to identify, exploit, and prevent web application vulnerabilities.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Exploiting an XML External Entity Injection


XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a format that is mainly used to describe the structure of documents or data; HTML, for example, is an implementation of XML which defines structure and format of pages and relations among them.

XML entities are similar to data structures that are defined inside an XML structure and some of them have the ability to read files from the system or even execute commands.

In this recipe, we will exploit an XML External Entity (XEE) Injection vulnerability to reach code execution in the server.

Getting ready

It is suggested that you follow the Abusing file inclusions and uploads recipe before doing this.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to http://192.168.56.102/mutillidae/index.php?page=xml-validator.php.

  2. It says that it is an XML validator; let's try to submit the example test and see what happens. In the XML box, put <somexml><message>Hello World</message></somexml> and click on Validate XML:

  3. Now, let's see...