Book Image

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition

By : Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari
Book Image

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition

By: Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari

Overview of this book

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition shows you how to set up a lab, helps you understand the nature and mechanics of attacking websites, and explains classical attacks in great depth. This edition is heavily updated for the latest Kali Linux changes and the most recent attacks. Kali Linux shines when it comes to client-side attacks and fuzzing in particular. From the start of the book, you'll be given a thorough grounding in the concepts of hacking and penetration testing, and you'll see the tools used in Kali Linux that relate to web application hacking. You'll gain a deep understanding of classicalSQL, command-injection flaws, and the many ways to exploit these flaws. Web penetration testing also needs a general overview of client-side attacks, which is rounded out by a long discussion of scripting and input validation flaws. There is also an important chapter on cryptographic implementation flaws, where we discuss the most recent problems with cryptographic layers in the networking stack. The importance of these attacks cannot be overstated, and defending against them is relevant to most internet users and, of course, penetration testers. At the end of the book, you'll use an automated technique called fuzzing to identify flaws in a web application. Finally, you'll gain an understanding of web application vulnerabilities and the ways they can be exploited using the tools in Kali Linux.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

A cryptography primer


First, we need to establish a clear differentiation between concepts that are often confused when talking about cryptography: encryption, encoding, obfuscation, and hashing:

  • Encryption: This is the process of altering data through mathematical algorithms in order to make it unintelligible to unauthorized parties. Authorized parties are able to decrypt the message back to cleartext using a key. AES, DES, Blowfish, and RSA are well-known encryption algorithms.
  • Encoding: This also alters the message, but its main goal is to allow that message to be processed by a different system. It doesn't require a key, and it's not considered a proper way of protecting information. Base64 encoding is commonly used in modern web applications to allow the transmission of binary data through HTTP.
  • Obfuscation: This makes the original message harder to read by transforming the message. JavaScript code obfuscation is used to prevent debugging and/or protect intellectual property and its most...