September 2011
Intermediate to advanced
912 pages
25h 4m
English
Content preview from The Web Application Hacker's Handbook, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 10Attacking Back-End Components
Web applications are increasingly complex offerings. They frequently function as the Internet-facing interface to a variety of business-critical resources on the back end, including networked resources such as web services, back-end web servers, mail servers, and local resources such as filesystems and interfaces to the operating system. Frequently, the application server also acts as a discretionary access control layer for these back-end components. Any successful attack that could perform arbitrary interaction with a back-end component could potentially violate the entire access control model applied by the web application, allowing unauthorized access to sensitive data and functionality.
When data is passed from one component to another, it is interpreted by different sets of APIs and interfaces. Data that is considered “safe” by the core application may be extremely unsafe within the onward component, which may support different encodings, escape characters, field delimiters, or string terminators. Additionally, the onward component may possess considerably more functionality than what the application normally invokes. An attacker exploiting an injection vulnerability can often go beyond merely breaking the application's access control. She can exploit the additional functionality supported by the back-end component to compromise key parts of the organization's infrastructure.
Injecting OS Commands
Most web server platforms have ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.