How to Break Web Software: Functional and Security Testing of Web Applications and Web Services by Mike Andrews, James A. Whittaker
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(Other Format)
- Pub. Date: February 2006
- 240pp
- Sales Rank: 726,143
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: February 2006
- Publisher: Addison-Wesley
- Format: Other Format, 240pp
- Sales Rank: 726,143
- ISBN-13: 9780321369444
- ISBN: 0321369440
Synopsis
"The techniques in this book are not an option for testers–they are mandatory and these are the guys to tell you how to apply them!"
–HarryRobinson, Google.
Rigorously test and improve the security of all your Web software!
It’s as certain as death and taxes: hackers will mercilessly attack your Web sites, applications, and services. If you’re vulnerable, you’d better discover these attacks yourself, before the black hats do. Now, there’s a definitive, hands-on guide to security-testing any Web-based software: How to Break Web Software.
In this book, two renowned experts address every category of Web software exploit: attacks on clients, servers, state, user inputs, and more. You’ll master powerful attack tools and techniques as you uncover dozens of crucial, widely exploited flaws in Web architecture and coding. The authors reveal where to look for potential threats and attack vectors, how to rigorously test for each of them, and how to mitigate the problems you find. Coverage includes
· Client vulnerabilities, including attacks on client-side validation
· State-based attacks: hidden fields, CGI parameters, cookie poisoning, URL jumping, and session hijacking
· Attacks on user-supplied inputs: cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and directory traversal
· Language- and technology-based attacks: buffer overflows, canonicalization, and NULL string attacks
· Server attacks: SQL Injection with stored procedures, command injection, and server fingerprinting
· Cryptography, privacy, and attacks on Web services
Your Web software is mission-critical–it can’t be compromised. Whether you’re a developer, tester, QA specialist, or IT manager, this book will help you protect that software–systematically.
Companion CD contains full source code for one testing tool you can modify and extend, free Web security testing tools, and complete code from a flawed Web site designed to give you hands-on practice in identifying security holes.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Mike Andrews is a senior consultant at Foundstone who specializes in software security and leads the Web application security assessments and Ultimate Web Hacking classes. He brings with him a wealth of commercial and educational experience from both sides of the Atlantic and is a widely published author and speaker. Before joining Foundstone, Mike was a freelance consultant and developer of Web-based information systems, working with clients such as The Economist, the London transport authority, and various United Kingdom universities. In 2002, after being an instructor and researcher for a number of years, Mike joined the Florida Institute of Technology as an assistant professor, where he was responsible for research projects and independent security reviews for the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research Labs, and Microsoft Corporation. Mike holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Kent at Canterbury in the United Kingdom, where his focus was on debugging tools and programmer psychology.
James A. Whittaker is a professor of computer science at the Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech) and is founder of Security Innovation. In 1992, he earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Tennessee. His research interests are software testing, software security, software vulnerability testing, and anticyber warfare technology. James is the author of How to Break Software (Addison-Wesley, 2002) and coauthor (with Hugh Thompson) of How to Break Software Security (Addison-Wesley, 2003), and over fifty peer-reviewed papers on software development and computer security. He holds patents on various inventions in software testing and defensivesecurity applications and has attracted millions in funding, sponsorship, and license agreements while a professor at Florida Tech. He has also served as a testing and security consultant for Microsoft, IBM, Rational, and many other United States companies.
In 2001, James was appointed to Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board and was named a “Top Scholar” by the editors of the Journal of Systems and Software, based on his research publications in software engineering. His research team at Florida Tech is known for its testing technologies and tools, which include the highly acclaimed runtime fault injection tool Holodeck. His research group is also well known for their development of exploits against software security, including cracking encryption, passwords and infiltrating protected networks via novel attacks against software defenses.
Customer Reviews
excellent overview of web attack vectorsby Anonymous
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March 17, 2006: Andrews and Whittaker describe to the Web programmer how your server side code can be vulnerable to attack across the Web. Web software has a server side and a client [or browser] side. These days, the browser code can be more than just passive HTML. It might have scripts, written in various scripting languages, typically JavaScript. The most common problem is that a cracker can get full access to your browser code. So while you might embed various tests on user input, or pass various parameters in the URL or forms, these can be read and usually altered. From which flows such attacks as buffer overflow, SQL injection and cross site scripting [XSS]. All of which means that the real tests must be done on your server, even if this means replicating tests already done in your browser code. The merit of this book is in how it provides a good level of introductory detail across the various attack vectors. While the topics discussed by the book can often be described in more detail elsewhere, if you need the extra information. For example, on buffer overflows, see 'Buffer Overflow Attacks' by Foster et al. While for defending against SQL injection, there is 'Guarding Your Website Against SQL Injection' by Breidenbach. Or, on the subject of using a Web server, Apache is the most common choice. Thus you can confer with 'Preventing Web Attacks with Apache' by Barnett, which just came out a few weeks ago. The latter book is a good complement to this one. The only quibble I have with 'How to Break Web Software' is in one sentence - 'Phishing is a scam that only diligence and the law will wipe out'. It says that no technical solution is possible. I disagree. I am the co-inventor of several antiphishing US Patent Pending methods, that will publish soon at uspto.gov. We believe these to be seminal, and furnish such a technical solution. We actually like this book and its quote, given that it was published in February 2006, and our first Provisionals were filed in September and October 2004. The text is one of several that reflects the state of the art after our submissions, and before they were publicly disclosed.
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