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

Injecting into NoSQL

The term NoSQL is used to refer to various data stores that break from standard relational database architectures. NoSQL data stores represent data using key/value mappings and do not rely on a fixed schema such as a conventional database table. Keys and values can be arbitrarily defined, and the format of the value generally is not relevant to the data store. A further feature of key/value storage is that a value may be a data structure itself, allowing hierarchical storage, unlike the flat data structure inside a database schema.

NoSQL advocates claim this has several advantages, mainly in handling very large data sets, where the data store's hierarchical structure can be optimized exactly as required to reduce the overhead in retrieving data sets. In these instances a conventional database may require complex cross-referencing of tables to retrieve information on behalf of an application.

From a web application security perspective, the key consideration is...