Book Image

Zed Attack Proxy Cookbook

By : Ryan Soper, Nestor N Torres, Ahmed Almoailu
Book Image

Zed Attack Proxy Cookbook

By: Ryan Soper, Nestor N Torres, Ahmed Almoailu

Overview of this book

Maintaining your cybersecurity posture in the ever-changing, fast-paced security landscape requires constant attention and advancements. This book will help you safeguard your organization using the free and open source OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) tool, which allows you to test for vulnerabilities and exploits with the same functionality as a licensed tool. Zed Attack Proxy Cookbook contains a vast array of practical recipes to help you set up, configure, and use ZAP to protect your vital systems from various adversaries. If you're interested in cybersecurity or working as a cybersecurity professional, this book will help you master ZAP. You’ll start with an overview of ZAP and understand how to set up a basic lab environment for hands-on activities over the course of the book. As you progress, you'll go through a myriad of step-by-step recipes detailing various types of exploits and vulnerabilities in web applications, along with advanced techniques such as Java deserialization. By the end of this ZAP book, you’ll be able to install and deploy ZAP, conduct basic to advanced web application penetration attacks, use the tool for API testing, deploy an integrated BOAST server, and build ZAP into a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Crawling with the AJAX Spider

AJAX web applications can use XML to transport data, but many web applications can equally use JSON text or plain text to transport data as well. AJAX is a way for web applications to update asynchronously (web services, API endpoints, and JavaScript fetch methods) by exchanging data with a web server on the backend. This allows a web page to update parts of a page without reloading it entirely. The AJAX Spider creates a proxy for ZAP to talk to Crawljax, which is an open source, event-driven, and dynamic crawling tool.

Getting ready

You need to crawl Juice Shop using ZAP, so start and run both before commencing this recipe.

How to do it…

There are three methods to start AJAX crawling. The first method is in the Sites tree window. To start AJAX crawling, right-click on the site of choice to AJAX-crawl, hover over Attack, and click on Ajax Spider…, as shown in Figure 3.10.

Figure 3.10 – Starting the AJAX Spider through the Sites tree

Figure 3.10 – Starting...