a4apphack

HTML5 is a new and upcoming technology which has enough features to introduce potential security issues if not properly implemented. A new project has been initiated in Google Code to keep developers updated on the security concerns to be kept in mind while developing their apps with HTML5.

Description of Project in Authors Terms,

This project is an attempt to create a well maintained, informative and categorized cheat sheet to highlight HTML5 as well as other client side and related security issues and ways to avoid them. The project is meant to target web developers as well as security researchers and especially browser vendors since many of the problems we found are based on faulty or quirky implementations. Focus is on completeness, comprehensibility and timeliness as well as continuity – benefits many other related cheat sheets don’t exactly provide.

Read the rest of this entry »

Websecurify is a powerful web application security testing environment designed from the ground up to provide the best combination of automatic and manual vulnerability testing technologies. This tool automatically identifies web application vulnerabilities by using advanced discovery and fuzzing technologies.

Websecurify Scan in Progress

FlashCookiesView is a small utility that displays the list of cookie files created by Flash component (Local Shared Object) in your Web browser. For each cookie file, the lower pane of FlashCookiesView displays the content of the file in readable format or as Hex dump. If you are a security tester, this can help you while testing for flash applications – to analyse the sensitive content in the flash generated cookies.

You can also select one or more cookie files, and then copy them to the clipboard, save them to text/html/xml file or delete them.

Flash Cookie Viewer

Read the rest of this entry »

ZeroDayScan is an online web application scanner which crawls through the app and discovers the vulnerabilities in the application. It attempts to find out the common web vulnerabilities like XSS, SQL Injection and all the way down to web app fingerprinting.

As per their FAQ it takes around half an hour to scan normal sized websites, but as soon as I initiated scan for my website, I got a notification mail saying that it takes around 72 hours to complete the scan but I got the results emailed in about 5 hours.

Read the rest of this entry »

Its very rare to find out a good n effective web application security assessment tool and would make it almost impossible if you want it for free. After a long time of hunt, I found one; CAT – Context App Tool. Although its free, it offers a good GUI and powerful features along with the basic ones which comes with a every proxy available.

Features

There are a number of features which CAT has to enable a wide variety of testing to be conducted:

• Request Repeater – Used for repeating a single request
• Proxy – Classic Inline proxy
• Fuzzer – Allows for batch of tests to be sent to a server for brute forcing, parameter fuzzing, forced browsing etc.
• Log – View a list of requests to sort, search repeat etc. Allows for a sequence of requests to be repeated and modified.
• Authentication Checker – Two synchronised proxies which can be used to check authentication and authorisation controls.
• SSL Checker – Request a specific page with various SSL ciphers and versions.
• Notepad – A text/RTF editor which can be used as a scratch pad for conversions etc.
• Web Browser – An integrated web browser with proxy pre-configured based on the Internet Explorer’s rendering engine.

Reasons to use CAT

There are a number of differences between CAT and currently available web proxies. Some key differences are:

• Uses Internet Explorer’s rendering engine for accurate HTML representation
• Supports many different types of text conversions including: URL, Base64, Hex, Unicode, HTML/XML, SQL and JavaScript no Quotes
• Integrated SQL Injection and XSS Detection
• Synchronised Proxies for Authentication and Authorisation checking
• Faster due to HTTP connection caching
• SSL Version and Cipher checker using OpenSSL
• Greater flexibility for importing/exporting logs and saving projects
• Tabbed Interface allowing for multiple tools at once e.g. multiple repeaters and different logs
• The ability to repeat and modify a sequence of requests (particularly useful in SSO testing)
• Free!

Read the rest of this entry »

HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library written in PHP. HTML Purifier will remove all malicious code (efficient filtering of XSS scripts) with a thoroughly audited, secure yet permissive whitelist.

HTML Comparison Chart

Quick Install

1
2
3
4
5
6

<?php
    require_once '/path/to/htmlpurifier/library/HTMLPurifier.auto.php';
 
    $purifier = new HTMLPurifier();
    $clean_html = $purifier->purify($dirty_html);
?>

View Before-After XSS Filtering

View Demo: HTML Purifier

Download HTML Purfier : (More Info at: http://htmlpurifier.org/)

Stay updated with addons discussed in the SecFox series, the most popular section of this blog. For that you need to subscribe to the SecFox addon collection available in the mozilla addons site.

SecFox is collection of addons which can be used to customize any firefox to a security assessment tool. At the time of writing this collection has 40+ addons which can help the web app sec testers during their assessments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Web AppSec Testing Checklist is an Excel based checklist which helps you to track the status of completed and pending test cases. This helps you to organize the flow of your testing process and also to ensure that none of the test cases are missed out.

WebApp Sec Checklist

This checklist is completely based on OWASP Testing Guide v 3. The OWASP Testing Guide includes a “best practice” penetration testing framework which users can implement in their own organizations and a “low level” penetration testing guide that describes techniques for testing most common web application and web service security issues.

Read the rest of this entry »

“CrossSite Scripting (XSS) attacks are a type of injection problem, in which malicious scripts are injected into the otherwise benign and trusted web sites. Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. Flaws that allow these attacks to succeed are quite widespread and occur anywhere a web application uses input from a user in the output it generates without validating or encoding it.

An attacker can use XSS to send a malicious script to an unsuspecting user. The end user’s browser has no way to know that the script should not be trusted, and will execute the script. Because it thinks the script came from a trusted source, the malicious script can access any cookies, session tokens, or other sensitive information retained by your browser and used with that site. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML page.” – OWASP

Understanding XSS or to make one understand it ain’t easy. Too much of theory will confuse the person rather than helping him out. The best way of explaining it!; through flash animations and that is how virtualforge guys have done. This animation is intended for both a layman and a security analyst.

They have published two set of flash applications which demonstrates XSS. Here cookie theft and file access are demonstrated.

Screenshot

Check the following links

Example 1 : Car Auction

http://www.virtualforge.de/vmovie/xss_lesson_1/xss_selling_platform_v1.0.swf

Example 2 : Online Application

http://www.virtualforge.de/vmovie/xss_lesson_2/xss_selling_platform_v2.0.swf

Read More about XSS at Wiki and OWASP

See CrossSiteRequestForgery (XSRF) in action, [intlink id="199" type="post"]here[/intlink].

Hackbar is a tiny toolbar in Firefox with features to aid in application pen-testing. This can be used to perform our security tests quickly and effectively.

Read the rest of this entry »