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 authentication


Decoupling brings about a few more challenges when it comes to authentication and authorization. It's not uncommon to have an API that does not require authentication, but the chances are some web services you'll encounter will require their clients to authenticate in one way or another.

So, how do we achieve authentication with APIs? This process is not that different from a typical application. At its core, authentication requires that you provide something you know and, optionally, something you have, which corresponds to a record in the API's database. If that something you know and something you have is a secret and only the holder of this information, presumably, has access to it, the API can be reasonably sure that the client providing this information is given access. The API now only needs to track this particular client, since HTTP is stateless.

Traditional web applications will accept authentication data (something you know, along with a username and password...