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)

Why are clients so weak?

Client-focused attacks span several of the OWASP 2013 and 2017's Top 10 Threat categories. Client-side attacks using DOM-based Cross Site Scripting (XSS) are a powerful method of leveraging weaknesses in validation to embed scripts into web responses and inserting code into clients. The client-focused, DOM-based XSS can deliver code to the clients to effect compromises made on web applications, but there is a variety of vulnerabilities that hackers will exploit to reach and impact clients, such as a unvalidated redirects and forwards, websockets attacks, or clickjacking. A third category in both the 2013 and 2017 versions of the OWASP Top 10 is a vulnerability to Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), which leverages victim clients as a pivot and takes advantage of their authenticated status to compromise other sites.

There are other attacks that bleed...