Mastering Modern Web Penetration Testing

Double encoding

Double percent encoding is the same as percent encoding with a twist that each character is encoded twice instead of once. This technique comes in pretty handy when attempting to evade filters which attempt to blacklist certain encoded characters, so we can double encode instead and let the filter decode to the original form. This technique only works where recursive decoding is done.

It is the same technique that was used in the infamous IIS 5.0 directory traversal exploit in 2001.

Double encoding sometimes works well in Local File Inclusion (LFI) or Remote File Inclusion (RFI) scenarios as well, in which we need to encode our path payload. Typically ../../ or ..\..\ is used to traverse back to the parent directory; some filters ...