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

Let’s Encrypt Communication


In order to provide some transport security, we may want spawn an HTTPS server or maybe use SMTPS. We could use self-signed certificates, but this is not ideal. Clients become suspicious when the TLS alert pops up on their browser, or network proxies may drop the connection altogether. We want to use a certificate which is signed by a trusted root certificate authority. There are countless paid services which offer all manner of TLS certificates, but the easiest and most cost effective is Let’s Encrypt.

Let’s Encrypt, a root certificate authority trusted by most clients, allows server administrators to request free, domain-validated certificates for their hosts. Their mission is to help move us towards an encrypted internet, and free certificates is a great step forward.

Note

Let’s Encrypt provides free domain-validated certificates for hostnames and even wildcard certificates. More information can be found on https://letsencrypt.org/.

For demonstration purposes,...