Enumerating as much of the application’s content as possible is only one element of the mapping process. Equally important is the task of analyzing the application’s functionality, behavior, and technologies employed, in order to identify the key attack surfaces that it exposes, and begin formulating an approach to probing the application for exploitable vulnerabilities. Some … Read more
The enumeration techniques described so far have been implicitly driven by one particular picture of how web application content may be conceptualized and catalogued. This picture is inherited from the pre application days of the World Wide Web, in which web servers functioned as repositories of static information, retrieved using URLs that were effectively filenames. … Read more
It is very common for applications to contain content and functionality which is not directly linked or reachable from the main visible content. A common example of this is functionality that has been implemented for testing or debugging purposes and has never been removed. Another example arises where the application presents different functionality to different … Read more
This is a more sophisticated and controlled technique, which is usually preferable to automated spidering. Here, the user walks through the application in the normal way using a standard browser, attempting to navigate through all of the application’s functionality. As he does so, the resulting traffic is passed through a tool combining an intercepting proxy … Read more
In a typical application, the majority of the content and functionality can be identified via manual browsing. The basic approach is to walk through the application starting from the main initial page, following every link and navigating through all multistage functions (such as user registration or password resetting). If the application contains a “site map,” … Read more
The first step in the process of attacking an application is to gather and examine some key information about it, in order to gain a better understanding of what you are up against. The mapping exercise begins by enumerating the application’s content and functionality, in order to understand what the application actually does and how … Read more
Web applications employ several different encoding schemes for their data. Both the HTTP protocol and the HTML language are historically text-based, and different encoding schemes have been devised to ensure that unusual characters and binary data can be safely handled by these mechanisms. When you are attacking a web application, you will frequently need to … Read more
The technologies described so far enable the server and client components of a web application to exchange and process data in numerous ways. To implement most kinds of useful functionality, however, applications need to track the state of each user’s interaction with the application across multiple requests. For example, a shopping application may allow users … Read more
In order for the server-side application to receive user input and actions, and present the results of these back to the user, it needs to provide a client-side user interface. Because all web applications are accessed via a web browser, these interfaces all share a common core of technologies. However, these have been built upon … Read more
In addition to the core communications protocol used to send messages between client and server, web applications employ numerous different technologies to deliver their functionality. Any reasonably functional application may employ dozens of distinct technologies within its server and client components. Before you can mount a serious attack against a web application, you need a … Read more