Book Image

Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing

By : Prakhar Prasad, Rafay Baloch
Book Image

Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing

By: Prakhar Prasad, Rafay Baloch

Overview of this book

Web penetration testing is a growing, fast-moving, and absolutely critical field in information security. This book executes modern web application attacks and utilises cutting-edge hacking techniques with an enhanced knowledge of web application security. We will cover web hacking techniques so you can explore the attack vectors during penetration tests. The book encompasses the latest technologies such as OAuth 2.0, Web API testing methodologies and XML vectors used by hackers. Some lesser discussed attack vectors such as RPO (relative path overwrite), DOM clobbering, PHP Object Injection and etc. has been covered in this book. We'll explain various old school techniques in depth such as XSS, CSRF, SQL Injection through the ever-dependable SQLMap and reconnaissance. Websites nowadays provide APIs to allow integration with third party applications, thereby exposing a lot of attack surface, we cover testing of these APIs using real-life examples. This pragmatic guide will be a great benefit and will help you prepare fully secure applications.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding REST APIs


REST stands for Representational State Transfer, which is simply an architectural philosophy that is implemented while designing APIs. Web application APIs following the REST style are referred to as a REST API. For example, GitHub's Developer API is a REST API since it follows REST style.

Now let's go through a few concepts of REST APIs.

REST API concepts

These are some concepts that we need to understand before we get started with testing REST APIs:

  • URIs

  • URI format

  • Resource modeling

URIs

REST APIs make use of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to access resources.

For example, https://api.github.com/users/PacktPublishing.

This format is very easy to understand and is readable to a normal human being. Here, it is understandable that the client is requesting data of the user, which is PacktPublishing in this case.

URI format

The generic URI syntax as defined in RFC 3986 is shown as following:

URI = scheme "://" authority "/" path [ "?" query ] [ "#" fragment ]

We are interested...