Becoming the Hacker

Chapter 10. Practical Server-Side Attacks

In the previous chapter, we went through a series of practical attacks against users, leveraging application vulnerabilities to achieve our goal. The focus of this chapter will be server-side attacks, primarily by exploiting XML vulnerabilities. Despite the fact that JSON has gained a large market share of data exchange in web applications, XML is still fairly prevalent. It's not as clean as JSON and can be a bit harder to read, but it is mature. There are a ton of XML-parsing libraries for any language a developer may choose to complete a project with. Java is still popular in the enterprise world and the Android phenomenon has only spawned more Java enthusiasts. Microsoft is still very fond of XML and ...