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

Exploiting CSRF in JSON requests


JSON is a popular format to exchange data over the Internet in client-server architectures. These days there's a growing trend in which developers are utilizing JSON for browser to server communication.

A JSON-based POST data looks like the following:

In terms of our CSRF exploitation scenario, the problem arises with the fact that there are no query parameters with the JSON format, which are a must with self-submitting forms. To bypass this, we can use a self-submitting form, with a hidden input with only a name attribute but no value. In other words, the name will contain the JSON payload to exploit the CSRF. We'll have to change the encoding type to text/plain for sanity. The exploit code will look like the following:

<html>
  <head>
  </head>
  <body onload=document.getElementById('xsrf').submit()>
    <form id="xsrf" action=" https://bank.example.com/transfer/money" method=post enctype="text/plain" >
      <input name='...