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 19Finding Vulnerabilities in Source Code
So far, the attack techniques we have described have all involved interacting with a live running application and have largely consisted of submitting crafted input to the application and monitoring its responses. This chapter examines an entirely different approach to finding vulnerabilities — reviewing the application's source code.
In various situations it may be possible to perform a source code audit to help attack a target web application:
- Some applications are open source, or use open source components, enabling you to download their code from the relevant repository and scour it for vulnerabilities.
- If you are performing a penetration test in a consultancy context, the application owner may grant you access to his or her source code to maximize the effectiveness of your audit.
- You may discover a file disclosure vulnerability within an application that enables you to download its source code (either partially or in its entirety).
- Most applications use some client-side code such as JavaScript, which is accessible without requiring any privileged access.
It is often believed that to carry out a code review, you must be an experienced programmer and have detailed knowledge of the language being used. However, this need not be the case. Many higher-level languages can be read and understood by someone with limited programming experience. Also, many types of vulnerabilities manifest themselves in the same way across all the ...
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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.