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

Chapter 8. Bad Serialization

Object serialization is an interesting programming concept that aims to take structured live data from memory and make it transmittable over the wire or easily stored somewhere for later use. An object, such as a memory structure of an application's database connection details, for example, can be serialized, or converted into an easy-to-transport stream of bytes, such as a human-readable string. A string representation of this memory structure can now be easily written to a text file or sent to another web application over HTTP. The serialized data string can then be used to instantiate the database object in memory, with the properties, such as database name or credentials, pre-populated. The receiving web application can recreate the memory structure by deserializing the string of bytes. Serialization is also referred to as marshalling, pickling, or flattening, and it is provided by many languages, including Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

Depending on the language...