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

XML 101 – the basics


Let's go through a brief tour of XML and then we'll move to the sections of our interest. The reason XML was created is that data stored in flat files (or normal data files) are a big nuisance to handle while transporting or reading them. For every flat file, the developer needs to write their own parser that is tailor-made for their purpose. But that's not the case with XML, a generic XML parser is used and the developer only needs to write code to parse the document using the parser, not the parser itself. XML format focuses on code-readability and ease in parsing.

An XML document looks like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<student> 
    <name>James Jones</name>
    <roll >PACKT/1001/16</roll>
    <dob>17-01-1947</dob>
    <address>Birmingham, United Kingdom</address>
</student>

XML elements

As you can see, the XML document contains different tags which contain different types of data...