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

API communication protocols


At their core, web APIs are simple HTTP client-server environments. A request comes in over HTTP and a response goes out. To standardize things a bit more, a couple of protocols have been developed, and many APIs follow one or the other to process requests. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is likely what you'll encounter in the wild:

  • Representational State Transfer (REST)

  • Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)

There are certainly other types of protocols that APIs can use, but while their protocols differ, the majority of the same security challenges remain. The most popular protocols are RESTful APIs, followed by SOAP APIs.

SOAP

SOAP was developed by Microsoft because Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) is a binary protocol, which makes communication over the internet a bit more complicated. SOAP leverages XML instead, a more structured and human-readable language, to exchange messages between the client and the server.

Note

SOAP is standardized...