Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers

Config Files

Config management is an entire branch of operations that ensures configuration credentials are never exposed. Whether you're injecting them at runtime via a service such as consul (see Further reading for a link) or simply leaving them unversioned by including them in your project's .gitignore, there are varying degrees of sophistication in the available solutions.

But sometimes those measures fail and a config file is included in a server's root directory, logs on an exposed build server, application error messages, or a public code repository. That can make the sensitive contents of that config fair game for any attackers.

Earlier, we discussed discovering sensitive config files in the context of applying fuzzing tools such ...