Book Image

Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing

By : Prakhar Prasad, Rafay Baloch
Book Image

Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing

By: Prakhar Prasad, Rafay Baloch

Overview of this book

Web penetration testing is a growing, fast-moving, and absolutely critical field in information security. This book executes modern web application attacks and utilises cutting-edge hacking techniques with an enhanced knowledge of web application security. We will cover web hacking techniques so you can explore the attack vectors during penetration tests. The book encompasses the latest technologies such as OAuth 2.0, Web API testing methodologies and XML vectors used by hackers. Some lesser discussed attack vectors such as RPO (relative path overwrite), DOM clobbering, PHP Object Injection and etc. has been covered in this book. We'll explain various old school techniques in depth such as XSS, CSRF, SQL Injection through the ever-dependable SQLMap and reconnaissance. Websites nowadays provide APIs to allow integration with third party applications, thereby exposing a lot of attack surface, we cover testing of these APIs using real-life examples. This pragmatic guide will be a great benefit and will help you prepare fully secure applications.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

HttpOnly and secure cookie flags


HttpOnly is a flag attached to cookies that instruct the browser not to expose the cookie through client-side scripts (document.cookie and others). The agenda behind HttpOnly is not to spill out cookies when an XSS vulnerability exists, as an attacker might be able to run their script but the fundamental benefit of having an XSS vulnerability (the ability steal cookies and hijack a currently established session) is lost.

HttpOnly cookies were first introduced in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 SP1, and as of now, this has become a common practice while setting session cookies. The syntax of this is as follows:

Set-Cookie: Name=Value; expires=Wednesday, 01-May-2014 12:45:10 GMT; HttpOnly

In this HTTP header ; HttpOnly instructs the browser to save the cookie without exposing it to client-side scripts.

A secure flag, on the other hand, forces the browser to transmit cookies through an encrypted channel such as HTTPS, which prevents eavesdropping, especially when...