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

Common authentication flaws in web applications


We have spent some time discussing how different authentication mechanisms work in web applications. In this section, you will learn how to identify and exploit some of the most common security failures in them.

Lack of authentication or incorrect authorization verification

In the previous chapter, you saw how to use DIRB and other tools to find directories and files that may not be referenced by any page on the web server or that may contain privileged functionality, such as /admin and /user/profile. If you are able to browse directly to those directories and use the functionality within them without having to authenticate, or if being authenticated as a standard user, you can browse to the application's administrative area or modify other user's profiles just by browsing to them, then that application has a major security issue with regard to its authentication and/or authorization mechanisms.

Username enumeration

In black box and gray box penetration...