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 8. XML Attacks

In this chapter, we'll cover some techniques for attacking XML parsers. XML parsers are basically programs or libraries which take an XML document as input, then parse the same for retrieving the content in a meaningful and easy way. For those who are unaware, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is used for data exchange purposes. XML syntax at a glance looks very similar to HTML but it is used only for storing data, albeit in a more organized way. By default, an XML document is just a plain text document which actually does nothing. To make use of XML we need programs which actually read the file and do something meaningful based on them, and hence XML parsers come into the picture. XML is open standard, free, and is supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Let's now dive deep and go through various sections of this chapter.

Note

Warning:

A few sections in this chapter will contain techniques of Denial-of-Service (DoS), please keep in mind that DoS techniques...