To some extent, an organization deploying a third-party web server product is inevitably placing its fate in the hands of the software vendor. Nevertheless, there is still a large amount that a security-conscious organization can do to protect itself against the kind of software vulnerabilities. Choose Software with a Good Track Record Not all software … Read more
If you are lucky, the web server you are targeting may contain some of the actual vulnerabilities described in this chapter. More likely, however, it will have been patched to a more recent level, and you will need to search for something fairly current or brand new with which to attack the server. A good … Read more
Encoding flaws have arisen in many kinds of web server software and present an inherent threat in situations where the same user-supplied data is processed by several layers using different technologies. A typical web request might be handled by the web server, the application platform, various man-aged and unmanaged APIs, other software components, and the … Read more
The barriers to automation described previously lead to a number of specific technical challenges that must be addressed in the creation of an effective vulnerability scanner. These challenges impinge not only upon the scanner’s ability to detect specific types of vulnerability, as already described, but also upon its ability to perform the core tasks of … Read more
Some attacks on web applications can be performed using only a standard web browser; however, the majority of them require you to use some additional tools. Many of these tools operate in conjunction with the browser, either as extensions that modify the browser’s own functionality, or as external tools that run alongside the browser and … Read more
Many users access web applications from a shared environment in which an attacker may have direct access to the same computer as the user. This gives rise to a range of attacks to which insecure applications may leave their users vulnerable. There are several areas in which this kind of attack may arise. Persistent Cookies … Read more
ActiveX controls are of particular interest to an attacker who is targeting other users. When an application installs a control in order to invoke it from its own pages, the control must be registered as “safe for scripting.” Once this has occurred, any other web site accessed by the user can make use of that … Read more
JSON hijacking is a special version of an XSRF attack, which in certain circumstances can violate the objectives of the browser’s same origin policy. It enables a malicious web site to retrieve and process data from a different domain, thereby circumventing the “one-way” restriction that normally applies to XSRF. The possibility of JSON hijacking arises … Read more
HTTP header injection vulnerabilities arise when user-controllable data is inserted in an unsafe manner into an HTTP header returned by the application. If an attacker can inject newline characters into the header he controls, he can insert additional HTTP headers into the response and can write arbitrary content into the body of the response. This … Read more
The majority of interesting attacks against web applications involve targeting the server-side application itself. Many of these attacks do of course impinge upon other users — for example, an SQL injection attack that steals other users’ data. But the essential methodology of the attacker is to interact with the server in unexpected ways in order to … Read more