Web Application Security

Preface

Welcome to Web Application Security: Exploitation and Countermeasures for Modern Web Applications. In this preface, we will discuss the required foundations for successfully reading and understanding the content in this book. We will also discuss learning goals and attempt to build an archetypical reader profile so you (the reader) can understand if you will benefit from this book or not.

Consider completing this preface prior to moving on to Chapter 1 if you don’t know if this book is for you, or if you aren’t sure your existing skill set is ready for the technical content in the following chapters.

Prerequisite Knowledge and Learning Goals

This is a book that will not only aid you in learning how to defend your web application against hackers, but will also walk you through the steps hackers take in order to investigate and break into a web application.

Throughout this book we will discuss many techniques that hackers are using today to break into web applications hosted by corporations, governments, and occasionally even hobbyists.

Following sufficient investigation into the previously mentioned techniques, we begin a discussion on how to secure web applications against these hackers.

In doing so you will discover brand new ways of thinking about application architecture. You will also learn how to integrate security best practices into an engineering organization. Finally, we will evaluate a number of techniques for defending against the most common and dangerous ...