Book Image

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition

By : Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari
Book Image

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition

By: Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari

Overview of this book

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition shows you how to set up a lab, helps you understand the nature and mechanics of attacking websites, and explains classical attacks in great depth. This edition is heavily updated for the latest Kali Linux changes and the most recent attacks. Kali Linux shines when it comes to client-side attacks and fuzzing in particular. From the start of the book, you'll be given a thorough grounding in the concepts of hacking and penetration testing, and you'll see the tools used in Kali Linux that relate to web application hacking. You'll gain a deep understanding of classicalSQL, command-injection flaws, and the many ways to exploit these flaws. Web penetration testing also needs a general overview of client-side attacks, which is rounded out by a long discussion of scripting and input validation flaws. There is also an important chapter on cryptographic implementation flaws, where we discuss the most recent problems with cryptographic layers in the networking stack. The importance of these attacks cannot be overstated, and defending against them is relevant to most internet users and, of course, penetration testers. At the end of the book, you'll use an automated technique called fuzzing to identify flaws in a web application. Finally, you'll gain an understanding of web application vulnerabilities and the ways they can be exploited using the tools in Kali Linux.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

File inclusion vulnerabilities


In a web application, the developer may include code stored on a remote server or code from a file stored locally on a server. Referencing files other than the ones in the web root is mainly used for combining common code into files that can be later referenced by the main application.

An application is vulnerable to file inclusion when it takes input parameters to determine the name of the file to include; hence, a user can set the name of a malicious file previously uploaded to the server (Local File Inclusion) or the name of a file in another server (Remote File Inclusion).

Local File Inclusion

In a Local File Inclusion (LFI) vulnerability, files local to the server are accessed by the include function without proper validation; that is, files containing server code are included in a page and their code is executed. This is a very practical feature for developers, as they can reuse code and optimize their resources. The problem arises when user-provided parameters...