Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers

Source Code

Source-code analysis is typically thought of as something that only takes place in a white box, an internal testing scenario, either as part of an automated build chain or as a manual review. But analyzing client-side code available to the browser is also an effective way of looking for vulnerabilities as an outside researcher.

We're specifically going to look at retire (Retire.js), a node module that has both Node and CLI components, and analyzes client-side JavaScript and Node modules for previously-reported vulnerabilities. You can install it easily using npm and then using the global flag (-g) to make it accessible in your $PATH: npm install -g retire. Reporting a bug that may have been discovered in a vendor's software, but ...