Book Image

Becoming the Hacker

By : Adrian Pruteanu
Book Image

Becoming the Hacker

By: Adrian Pruteanu

Overview of this book

Becoming the Hacker will teach you how to approach web penetration testing with an attacker's mindset. While testing web applications for performance is common, the ever-changing threat landscape makes security testing much more difficult for the defender. There are many web application tools that claim to provide a complete survey and defense against potential threats, but they must be analyzed in line with the security needs of each web application or service. We must understand how an attacker approaches a web application and the implications of breaching its defenses. Through the first part of the book, Adrian Pruteanu walks you through commonly encountered vulnerabilities and how to take advantage of them to achieve your goal. The latter part of the book shifts gears and puts the newly learned techniques into practice, going over scenarios where the target may be a popular content management system or a containerized application and its network. Becoming the Hacker is a clear guide to web application security from an attacker's point of view, from which both sides can benefit.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Becoming the Hacker
Contributors
Preface
Index

Polyglot payloads


A polyglot payload is defined as a piece of code that can be executed in multiple contexts in the application. These types of payloads are popular with attackers because they can quickly test an application's input controls for any weaknesses, with minimal noise.

In a complex application, user input can travel through many checkpoints—from the URL through a filter, into a database, and back out to a decoder, before being displayed to the user, as illustrated in the following figure:

Figure 2.29: Typical data flow from user to application

Any one of the steps along the way can alter or block the payload, which may make it more difficult to confirm the existence of a vulnerability in the application. A polyglot payload will attempt to exploit an injection vulnerability by combining multiple methods for executing code in the same stream. This attempts to exploit weaknesses in the application payload filtering, increasing the chance that at least one portion of the code will...