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

Fuzzing for Common Vulnerabilities

The third main use of customized automation does not involve targeting any known vulnerability to enumerate or extract information. Rather, your objective is to probe the application with various crafted attack strings designed to cause anomalous behavior within the application if particular common vulnerabilities are present. This type of attack is much less focused than the ones previously described, for the following reasons:

  • It generally involves submitting the same set of attack payloads as every parameter to every page of the application, regardless of the normal function of each parameter or the type of data the application expects to receive. These payloads are sometimes called fuzz strings.
  • You do not know in advance precisely how to identify hits. Rather than monitoring the application's responses for a specific indicator of success, you generally need to capture as much detail as possible in a clear form. Then you can easily review this...