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

Preventing and mitigating Cross-Site Scripting


As with any other injection vulnerability, a proper input validation is the first line of defense in order to prevent XSS. Also, if possible, avoid using user inputs as output information. Sanitization and encoding are key aspects of preventing XSS.

Sanitization means removing inadmissible characters from the string. This is useful when no special characters should exist in input strings.

Encoding converts special characters to their HTML code representation. For example, & to &amp; or < to &lt;. Some types of applications may need to allow the use of special characters in input strings. For those applications, sanitization is not an option. Thus, they should encode the output data before inserting it into the page and storing it in the database.

The validation, sanitization, and encoding processes must be done on both the client side and the server side in order to prevent all types of XSS and other code injections.

Note

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