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

Relative Path Overwrite


Relative Path Overwrite (RPO) is a new attack vector discovered by Gareth Heyes, a renowned web application researcher. RPO exploits the way browsers interpret relative paths while importing CSS files into a document, hence this attack is also referred to as Path Relative Stylesheet Import (PRSSI). If you're not aware of relative and absolute path URL CSS import, then let's have a quick look at:

Relative path import:

<link href="resource/rpo.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

Absolute path import:

<link href="https://sandbox.prakharprasd.com /resource/rpo.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

Here, the rpo.css file contains the following:

h1 {
    font-family: monospace;
    color: white;
    font-size: 50px;

}
body {
    background-color: black;
}

In the absolute path, we see a full and complete reference to the CSS file, the URL starts with the protocol handler and ends with the file. However, in the relative path, only the directory or file...