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

Analyzing the client-side code and storage


We have previously addressed how the increase in the client-side code can lead to potential security issues. AJAX uses XMLHttpRequest (XHR) objects to send asynchronous requests to the server. These XHR objects are implemented using client-side JavaScript code.

There are several ways to learn more about the client-side code. Viewing the source by pressing the Ctrl + U shortcut will reveal the underlying JavaScript that creates the XHR objects. If the web page and script are large, analyzing the application by viewing the source won't be helpful and/or practical.

To learn more about the actual request sent by the script, you can use a web application proxy and intercept the traffic, but the request will reach the proxy after passing through a number of processes in the client's script code, which may include validation, encoding, encryption, and other modifications that will complicate your understanding of how the application works.

In this section...