Book Image

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook

By : Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto
Book Image

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook

By: Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto

Overview of this book

Web applications are the front door to most organizations, exposing them to attacks that may disclose personal information, execute fraudulent transactions, or compromise ordinary users. This practical book has been completely updated and revised to discuss the latest step-by-step techniques for attacking and defending the range of ever-evolving web applications. Youíll explore the various new technologies employed in web applications that have appeared since the first edition and review the new attack techniques that have been developed, particularly in relation to the client side. The book starts with the current state of web application security and the trends that indicate how it is likely to evolve soon. Youíll examine the core security problem affecting web applications and the defence mechanisms that applications implement to address this problem, and youíll also explore the key technologies used in todayís web application. Next, youíll carry out tasks for breaking into web applications and for executing a comprehensive attack. As you progress, youíll learn to find vulnerabilities in an application's source code and review the tools that can help when you hack web applications. Youíll also study a detailed methodology for performing a comprehensive and deep attack against a specific target. By the end of this book, youíll be able to discover security flaws in web applications and how to deal with them.
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
2
Title
3
Copyright
4
About the Authors
5
About the Technical Editor
6
MDSec: The Authors’ Company
7
Credits
8
Acknowledgments
31
Index
32
End User License Agreement

The Need for State

The HTTP protocol is essentially stateless. It is based on a simple request-response model, in which each pair of messages represents an independent transaction. The protocol itself contains no mechanism for linking the series of requests made by a particular user and distinguishing these from all the other requests received by the web server. In the early days of the Web, there was no need for any such mechanism: websites were used to publish static HTML pages for anyone to view. Today, things are very different.

The majority of web “sites” are in fact web applications. They allow you to register and log in. They let you buy and sell goods. They remember your preferences the next time you visit. They deliver rich multimedia experiences with content created dynamically based on what you click and type. To implement any of this functionality, web applications need to use the concept of a session.

The most obvious use of sessions is in applications that...