Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Web Penetration Testing

By : Michael McPhee
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Web Penetration Testing

By: Michael McPhee

Overview of this book

You will start by delving into some common web application architectures in use, both in private and public cloud instances. You will also learn about the most common frameworks for testing, such as OWASP OGT version 4, and how to use them to guide your efforts. In the next section, you will be introduced to web pentesting with core tools and you will also see how to make web applications more secure through rigorous penetration tests using advanced features in open source tools. The book will then show you how to better hone your web pentesting skills in safe environments that can ensure low-risk experimentation with the powerful tools and features in Kali Linux that go beyond a typical script-kiddie approach. After establishing how to test these powerful tools safely, you will understand how to better identify vulnerabilities, position and deploy exploits, compromise authentication and authorization, and test the resilience and exposure applications possess. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the web service architecture to identify and evade various protection mechanisms that are used on the Web today. You will leave this book with a greater mastery of essential test techniques needed to verify the secure design, development, and operation of your customers' web applications.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Launching Client-Side Attacks

Web application testing rightfully focuses on the application we're testing and its supporting infrastructure. Most attacks we've focused onto this point have been interested in either knocking on the front door of that web application or hitchhiking on client sessions to gain illicit access. Our customers spend all of their security budget fortifying that infrastructure, with some of it geared toward the web application's own hardening. That being said, who is taking care of their clients?

Between the increased exposure of the client itself as well as the susceptibility of the user, we'll have a variety of vectors to test. The staggering number of software combinations and user behaviors overlap with other services and web applications, and modes of access (mobile versus desktop, roaming versus proxied, thick client versus thin...