Web Application Security

Chapter 17. Securing Modern Web Applications

Up to this point, we have spent a significant amount of time analyzing techniques that can be used for researching, analyzing, and breaking into web applications. These preliminary techniques are important in their own right, but also give us important insights as we move into the third and final part of this book: defense.

Today’s web applications are much more complex and distributed than their predecessors. This opens up the surface area for attack when compared to older, monolithic web applications—in particular, those with server-side rendering and little to no user interaction. These are the reasons I structured this book to start with recon, followed by offense, and finally defense.

I believe it is important to understand the surface area of a web application, and understand how such a surface area can be mapped and analyzed by a potential hacker. Beyond this, I believe that having an understanding of techniques hackers are using to break into web applications is also crucial knowledge for anyone looking into securing a web application. By understanding the methodology a hacker would use to break into your web application, you should be able to derive the best ways to prioritize your defenses and camouflage your application architecture and logic from malicious eyes.

All of the skills and techniques we have covered up until this point are synergistic. Improving your mastery of recon, offense, or defense will result in extremely ...