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

Exploring pseudo anti-CSRF tokens


There are certain cases where the CSRF tokens are injected into forms and sensitive URLs but are rarely checked and validated on the server side.

That being said, I recall a CSRF vulnerability in Facebook's AppCenter, uncovered by an Indian researcher called Amol Naik, in which he explained how he managed to bypass the AppCenter authentication (the AppCenter is basically a marketplace from which users can install different apps/games to their Facebook profile).

In the authentication phase Amol saw that Facebook was correctly sending their anti-CSRF token fb_dtsg alongside the approval request, however, on the server side, the request was not getting validated and was ignored, which simply meant that their token was of no use at all. Amol proceeded and removed the fb_dtsg parameter from the request altogether and the AppCenter app was still getting accepted.

So, while testing an application, we should always try to remove the CSRF token parameter/header from...