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

Fuzzing web applications


Fuzzing is a testing mechanism that sends specially-crafted (or random, depending on the type of fuzzing) data to a software implementation through its regular inputs. The implementation may be a web application, thick client, or a process running on a server. It is a black-box testing technique that injects data in an automated fashion. Though fuzzing is mostly used for security testing, it can also be used for functional testing.

One may think from the preceding definition that fuzzing is the same as any vulnerability scanning. And yes, fuzzing is part of the vulnerability scanning process that can also involve the fingerprinting and crawling of the web application and the analysis of the responses in order to determine if a vulnerability is present.

Sometimes, we need to take the fuzzing part out of the scanning process and execute it alone, so that it's on us and not the scanner to determine the test inputs and analyze the test results. This way, we can obtain...