December 2012
Intermediate to advanced
552 pages
13h 16m
English
Content preview from Web Application Defender's CookbookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 7
Defending Authentication
Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight.
—Sun Tzu in The Art of War
A key stratagem to use in defending your web applications can be divided into two parts: pre-authentication and post-authentication. Pre-authentication parts of your web site are locations where anonymous users may interact with it without specifying who they are. Post-authentication parts of your web site are available to users only after they have successfully logged in to their accounts. Different levels of functionality are available only after a user logs in to the web application. Once the application knows “who you are” then it may allow you access to specific data based on your role. Needless to say, the post-authentication portion of a web application provides access to more sensitive user data. Therefore, this part of an application is an attractive target for criminals.
Authentication is simply the process of proving to the web application that you are who you say you are. This is accomplished by submitting data from one or more of these categories:
- Something you know
- Something you have
- Something you are
Most web applications use only a single factor for authentication—a password (something you know). If a user supplies the correct password associated with an account, she is given access, and a SessionID is created for an active session. From that point on, the client supplies the SessionID ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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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.