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

Chapter 4. Cross-Site Request Forgery

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) is another common web vulnerability, in which an attacker tricks the victim's browser into generating requests to a website which performs certain actions on behalf of the logged in user or the victim. The web server processing the request executes the desired actions of the request, as it looks similar to any normal request generated by the users' browser. CSRF vulnerabilities can vary a lot in severity; benign ones can change settings or post on someone's behalf, but critical ones can result in password change, account takeover, and so on.

CSRF has been commonly featured in the OWASP Top-10 vulnerability list for the past few years. It's a widely misunderstood vulnerability by developers who often fail to understand the root cause of the issue, thereby implementing half-baked solutions to prevent the CSRF problem. I shall attempt to explain CSRF in a more technical fashion.

In this chapter, we will cover the following...