Wednesday, December 12, 2007

[Book] Web 2.0 Security - Defending AJAX, RIA, AND SOA

SOA, RIA, and Ajax are the backbone behind the now widerspread Web 2.0 applications such as MySpace, GoogleMaps, and Wikipedia. Although these robust tools make next generation web applications possible, they also add new security concerns to the field of web application security. Yamanner, Samy and Spaceflash type worms are exploiting “client-side” Ajax frameworks, providing new avenues of attack and compromising confidential information. Portals like Google, NetFlix, Yahoo and MySpace have witnessed new vulnerabilities in the past. These vulnerabilities can be leveraged by attackers to perform Phishing, Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF) exploitation. Web 2.0 Security: Defending Ajax, RIA, and SOA is the book to cover the new field of Web 2.0 security. Written for intermediate-to-advanced security professionals and developers, the book explores Web 2.0 hacking methods and helps in enhancing next generation security controls for better application security posture. Readers will gain knowledge in advanced footprinting and discovery techniques, Web 2.0 scanning and vulnerability detection methods, Ajax and Flash hacking methods, SOAP, REST and XML-RPC hacking, RSS/Atom feed attacks, fuzzing and code review methodologies and tools, tool building with Python, Ruby and .NET, and much, much more. The book includes a companion CD-ROM with tools, demos, samples, code, and images.

More on Amazon

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

[Clubhack - Conference] Hacking Web 2.0 Art and Science of Vulnerability Detection


ClubHack - Pune, India.

Going to talk on following: Web 2.0 applications are on the rise and as Gartner has predicted by end of 2007, 30% of applications would be running with Web 2.0 components embedded in it. This change in scenario would provide various different entry points and security holes for attackers. Hacking Web 2.0 is the most required skill for security professionals to identify vulnerability and associated threat before an attacker exploits it. New attack vectors are on the rise like two way CSRF access, XSS through JSON, JS-Object, XML and Array streams, Client side eval() exploitations, XPATH injection, WSDL scanning, Web Services payloads through SOAP and REST, XML-RPC method exploitation etc. One needs to do both scientific and artistic analysis of application to identify these vulnerabilities and this talk will cover these emerging attack vectors with plenty of demonstrations and tools. You will take home thorough knowledge about Web 2.0 hacking and would be in position to apply at work immediately.

Go to Conference page

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

DeepSec - Talk on Ajax Security

I had great time at Vienna last week. Did web hacking training and talked on Web 2.0 security. Conference was great and able to learn a lot from other speakers. Here is my talk.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

OWASP AppSec 2007 - .NET Web Services Hacking

AppSec at San-Jose was really fun. I was able to learn some good stuff. I talked on .NET Web Services Hacking. Here is my slide show.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

OWASP - .NET Web Services Hacking

.Net Web Services Hacking - Scan, Attacks and Defense
Following topics will be covered.
1. Web Services Discovery strategies in Web 2.0 applications
2. Scanning and profiling Web Services.
3. Attacking and Fuzzing Web Services for Vulnerability detection
4. Defense strategies for Web Services with content filtering (HTTPModule) - Web Services Firewall

Some of the content will be covered from my books - Hacking Web Services and Web 2.0 Security - Defending Ajax, RIA and SOA.

Look forward to see OWASP and WASC folks.

Monday, October 15, 2007

web2wall : Web Application/Services Firewall - IHTTPModule for Web 2.0 application

Microsoft‘s .Net framework includes two interfaces - IHTTPModule and IHTTPHandler. These two interfaces can be leveraged to provide application-level defense customized to application-level, folder-level or variable-level. This can act as the first line of defense, before any incoming request touches the Web application source code level. This is Web application defense at the gates, for the .Net framework on IIS.

Web2wall is a simple binary module which can be loaded in your Web 2.0 applications. You can defend your application layer code by using regex patterns; this can help in filtering XML and JSON streams. This tool is in beta and more features will be added with time. We will resolve bugs to make the module much more robust.

Download

Saturday, October 06, 2007

AppCodeScan - Application Code Scanning tool

This tool is designed to help in performing whitebox testing. During whitebox testing one needs to scan complete application code for various different vulnerabilities like XSS, SQL injection, Poor validations etc. It is possible to discover these vulnerable points using this tool and one can follow code walking across the code base to trace this vulnerability.This tool works on following two areas:

Code Scanning - One needs to feed target code folder, rules pattern in regex (sample is provided for ASP) and list of file extension to scan. The tool will take this information and run against the target folder with depth of three (3) and scan each line for matching pattern. If pattern is found then it will report that line in the tool.
Code Walker - This little utility would help in walking across the code base and find variable or function. This will help to trace variables and their entire path in the large code base. This utility would help in negating false positives from the identified pattern.


This tool runs on .NET framework and still in initial beta state. We are working on it and more features will be added.

Download and Play

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

[Dubai-ISACA] I-SAFE Information Governance in this e- World

Speaking on - EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: Web 2.0 on the rise and related technologies,strategies and security

This presentation is going to cover all aspects of emerging technologies in detail with real life cases and demonstrations. Following which, the session will explore security issues growing around these vectors and threats associated with it. Professionals will be able to collect enough know-how on emerging web technologies to apply this learning to their work place.

Read More

Monday, September 24, 2007

Tools are posted

Hi, I have posted following tools on the site

1. wsScanner - Web Services Footprinting, Discovery, Enumeration, Scanning and Fuzzing tool
2. scanweb2.0 - Web 2.0 Fingerprinting, Scanning and Discovery tools (Ruby scripts)
3. AppMap - Application footprinting and mapping tool using MSN APIs

It should help in assessment and audit.

Download from Blueinfy


Friday, September 14, 2007

HITB 2007 - Follow up...

HITB 2007 was great this time around as well. Both class and talk went really well. Speakers were good and was able to learn new stuff. All material is posted here.

I presented on Web 2.0 hacking, keeping focus on Ajax and Web Services. Added some new demos for better understanding. Presentation movie is not yet posted. Following is my presentation.



You can download slides from here
If you have any question feel free to drop me a note at shreeraj.shah@gmail.com

Enjoy...

Thursday, August 09, 2007

HITB 2007 - Class and Talk

Training - Advanced Web Application & Services Hacking [Here]
Speaking - Hacking Ajax and Web Services – Next Generation Web Attacks on the Rise [Here]

WEB 2.0 technologies for the Web application layer are still evolving. This framework consists of Web services, AJAX and SOAP/XML and while still evolving has thrown up new attack vectors. To combat the attacks one needs to understand the new methodology, tools and strategies. This presentation reveals emerging security threats, some of which will be demonstrated.

Logical evolution of Web applications has reached a new level with the introduction of WEB 2.0. WEB 2.0 is the combination of new technologies like Web services, AJAX and SOAP. It is important to understand this framework and the fundamentals, before looking at security threats. Ajax is becoming integral part of these new applications and its serialization aspect opens up new ways of hacking browser side application which can lead to XSS and XSRF.

Comprehending XML-based attack vectors LDAP/SQL injections, SOAP messaging attacks, AJAX and Web profiling. These shall be covered along with demonstration examples. Web services are the backbone of WEB 2.0 and it is important to understand security threats.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Change in contcat info...

Friends, Please kindly note my new email address and make changes to your address books. You can reach me at following email addresses.

shreeraj.shah_at_gmail.com
shreeraj_at_blueinfy.com

Thanks!

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

[DevX] Secure Your Wireless Networks with Scapy Packet Manipulation


With wireless networks beginning to dominate both home and corporate networking, new challenges on the security front are inevitable. The first step in securing a wireless network is determining the state of the network (without any prior knowledge) and then providing a defense against intrusions. Enter Scapy, an excellent packet-crafting tool written in Python by Philippe Biondi. Unlike other sniffers such as Kismet and Airodump-ng, Scapy is scriptable and extremely easy to use.

This article outlines a methodology for wireless network assessment and intrusion detection using proven techniques with tools such as Scapy.

Read Here

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Web 2.0 and Mod Security 2.0

Ajax and Web Services are two important aspects of Web 2.0 applications. In the past I wrote articles on defending application layer using Mod Security 1.0. New version of Mod Security is out there and Ryan C. Barnett has enhanced both the articles by adding 2.0 changes. They are posted on Mod Security site for community review. Here are pointers to both the documents. You may find it helpful.

Securing Web Services with ModSecurity 2

Ajax Fingerprinting and Filtering with ModSecurity 2

Monday, April 30, 2007

Web 2.0 Threats and Risks for Financial Services

Web 2.0 technologies are gaining momentum worldwide, penetrating in all industries as enterprise 2.0 applications. Financial services are no exception to this trend. One of the key driving factors behind penetration of Web 2.0 into the financial services sector is the “timely availability of information”. Wells Fargo, Merill Lynch and JP Morgan are developing their next generation technologies using Web 2.0 components; components that will be used in banking software, trading portals and other peripheral services. The true advantage of RSS components is to push information to the end user rather than pull it from the Internet. The financial industry estimates that 95% of information exists in non-RSS formats and could become a key strategic advantage if it can be converted into RSS format. Wells Fargo has already implemented systems on the ground and these have started to yield benefits. Financial services are tuning into Web 2.0 but are simultaneously exposing their systems to next generation threats such as Cross site Scripting (XSS), Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Application interconnection issues due to SOA.

Read my article

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Hacking Web 2.0 - Defending Ajax and Web Services

HITB 2007 at Dubai was fun and I presented on Web 2.0 hacking. If you would like to go through slides.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

WEB 2.0 Hacking – Defending Ajax and Web Services


WEB 2.0 technologies for the Web application layer are still evolving. This framework consists of Web services, AJAX and SOAP/XML and while still evolving has thrown up new attack vectors. To combat the attacks one needs to understand the new methodology, tools and strategies. Steadily emerging as the first line of defense is the Web application firewall. This presentation reveals emerging security threats, some of which will be demonstrated.

Here

Advanced Web Application & Services Hacking



Training at Dubai for HITB 2007.

A growing concern has been Web application security Web and application servers are the target of regular attacks by attackers that exploit security loopholes or vulnerabilities in code or design. Adding to this concern are next generation applications; applications that are on the fast track and more appealing to the user, utilizing dynamic AJAX scripts, Web services and newer Web technologies to create intuitive and easy interfaces. The only constant in this space is change. In this dynamically changing scenario it is important to understand new threats that emerge in order to build constructive strategies to protect corporate assets.

This two day workshop will expose students to both aspects of security: attacks and defense. To think of newer Web applications without Web services is a big mistake. Sooner or later existing applications will be forced to migrate to the new framework. This workshop includes several cases, demonstrations and hands-on exercises with newer tools to give you a headstart over others in the field.

Here

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

ISACA-UAE - Web Application Workshop ...



One day conference at Dubai on Web Application Security.
Here

Sunday, March 11, 2007

RSS Security Threats With Financial Services

Web 2.0 technologies are penetrating deeper into the financial services sector as Enterprise 2.0 solutions, adding value to financial services. Analysts can leverage information sources to go beyond the obvious. Trading and Banking companies like Wells Fargo and E*Trade are developing their next generation technologies using Web 2.0 components; components that will be used in banking software, trading portals and other peripheral services. The true advantage of RSS components is to push information to the end user rather than pull it from the Internet. The financial industry estimates that 95% of information exists in non-RSS formats and could become a key strategic advantage if it can be converted into RSS format. Wells Fargo has already implemented systems on the ground and these have started to yield benefits. RSS comes with its own security issues that assume critical significance with regard to financial services. In this article we will see some of the security concerns around RSS security and attack vectors.

Read here

My Bio with respect to Web Security Contribution...

Anurag is running a reflection series on his blog for web security professionals. He is compiling a list of person along with their resources. He has posted mine this week. You can read it here

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Web 2.0 with Banks - Web Risk: A Growing Web's Harder To Secure


Banks are moving towards Web 2.0 frameworks and adding risk to the application layer. This news item talks about it.

Read

Monday, February 19, 2007

Ajax scanning on AjaxWorld



Ajax Scanning technique for XSS is posted at AjaxWorld magazine.
Here

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Scanning Ajax for XSS Entry Points


The continuous adoption of Web 2.0 architecture for web applications is instrumental in Ajax, Web services and Flash, emerging as key components. Ajax is a combination of technologies such as JavaScript with the XMLHttpRequest object, DOM and XML streams. Cross site scripting (XSS) can make browsers vulnerable to critical information hijacking if exploited with malicious intent. XSS is already categorized as persistent, non-persistent and DOM-based. Ajax code loaded in browser can have entry points to XSS and it is the job of the security analyst to identify these entry points. It is difficult to decisively conclude that possible entry points to an application can be exploited. One may need to do a trace or debug to measure the risk of these entry points.

This paper introduces you to a quick way to identify XSS entry points in an application.

Read here

Friday, February 09, 2007

Stateful Web Application Firewalls with .NET


A Web Application Firewall (WAF), though still evolving, is crucial for strong application layer defense. Unfortunately, HTTP is a stateless protocol, and session management is addressed at the application layer and not at the protocol layer. It is possible to bridge WAF and session objects on the .NET platform to build a stateful WAF (SWAF).

Read Here

Monday, February 05, 2007

Slides to Share

I found slideshare.net an interesting place to share past talks. I have posted some of my past speaking engagements at RSA, Infosecworld, AusCERT, Bellua and HITB on it. You may like it.

Here

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Ajax Fingerprinting for Web 2.0 Applications


Fingerprinting is an age old concept and one that adds great value to assessment methodologies. There are several tools available for fingerprinting operating systems (nmap), Web servers (httprint), devices, etc. Each one of these tools uses a different method – inspecting the TCP stack, ICMP responses, HTTP responses. With this evolution of Web 2.0 applications that use Ajax extensively, it is important to fingerprint Ajax tools, framework or library used by a particular web site or a page. This paper describes the method of doing Ajax fingerprinting with a simple prototype serving as an example.
Read Here

Monday, January 29, 2007

Detect Your Web Application's Vulnerabilities Early with Ruby


Web application fuzzing is a method of detecting a web application's vulnerabilities prior to deploying the application on a production system. Users of this approach send several malicious requests to the application and, based on the responses received, determine the application's security posture. Users also can apply fuzzing to perform tests on several different attack vectors such as SQL, XPATH, and LDAP injection, and error handling.

Read Here

Friday, January 19, 2007

Crawling Ajax-driven Web 2.0 Applications


Crawling web applications is one of the key phases of automated web application scanning. The objective of crawling is to collect all possible resources from the server in order to automate vulnerability detection on each of these resources. A resource that is overlooked during this discovery phase can mean a failure to detect some vulnerabilities. The introduction of Ajax throws up new challenges for the crawling engine. New ways of handling the crawling process are required as a result of these challenges. The objective of this paper is to use a practical approach to address this issue using rbNarcissus, Watir and Ruby.

Full paper

Friday, January 05, 2007

Book review - Microsoft Technet





Technet posted book review on Hacking web services
Here
--
Shreeraj Shah's Hacking Web Services (Charles River Media, 2006) is a valuable resource for those involved in development, deployment, or support of Web services. The book is a well-organized general security reference for Web services and their component technologies. And it does a good job of detailing what is involved in defending them in your infrastructure and through your development practices.

The book begins with a relatively in-depth introduction to Web services A case study titled "The Consequences of Procrastination" teaches you about the power of preemptive security procedures and the penalties of reactive systems. The chapter titled "Web Services Scanning and Enumeration" discusses how to use the wsChess, a .NET-based Web service security toolkit from Net-Square (net-square.com/wschess/index.shtml), to profile and footprint Web services.

The book includes a utility CD, which contains a sample .NET-based application called SOAPWall. This shows you how to block injection characters and buffer overflows in your .NET Web services. In addition, the CD provides demos of different types of Web service attacks.
--

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

XSRF attack vector with Ajax serialization

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) is a commonly observed security issue in Web applications, and it can be exploited by an attacker or by a worm. Exploitation of this bug is very easy given there are several HTML tags and embedded JavaScript code snippets that can be leveraged by the browser to initiate a forged request without the consent or knowledge of an end user.

This request hits the vulnerable Web application like a cruise missile charged with the end user's session identity and the attacker's objective is achieved. This objective may be a request for a change of password, performing a financial transaction or sending forged email. A vulnerable Web 2.0 application can be susceptible to such an attack. With Web 2.0, another dimension is being added to this attack vector -- the blissfully unaware end user.

Read

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Vulnerability Scanning Web 2.0 Client-Side Components


Web 2.0 applications are a combination of several technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Flash, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Representational State Transfer (REST). All these technologies, along with cross-domain information access, contribute to the complexity of the application. We are seeing a shift towards empowerment of an end-user's browser by loading libraries.

All these changes mean new scanning challenges for tools and professionals. The key learning objectives of this article are to understand the following concepts and techniques:

* Scanning complexity and challenges in new generation Web applications
* Web 2.0 client-side scanning objectives and methodology
* Web 2.0 vulnerability detection (XSS in RSS feeds)
* Cross-domain injection with JSON
* Countermeasures and defense through browser-side filtering

Read

Monday, November 27, 2006

Web 2.0 defense with Ajax fingerprinting & filtering

(IN)SECURE magazine contains my article on Ajax fingerprinting and filtering technique. It can help in defending Web 2.0 applications.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Top 10 Ajax Security Holes and Driving Factors


One of the central ingredients of Web 2.0 applications is Ajax encompassed by JavaScripts. This phase of evolution has transformed the Web into a superplatform. Not surprisingly, this transformation has also given rise to a new breed of worms and viruses such as Yamanner, Samy and Spaceflash. Portals like Google, NetFlix, Yahoo and MySpace have witnessed new vulnerabilities in the last few months. These vulnerabilities can be leveraged by attackers to perform Phishing, Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF) exploitation.

Read

Thursday, November 02, 2006

[O'reilly Net] Detecting Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

Your web application is only as secure as the data coming in, and how you treat user input determines how secure you are. A little bit of thought and Python programming can help you analyze potential vulnerabilities in your code

Read Here

Monday, October 23, 2006

How safe is Web 2.0?




Technology commentator Bill Thompson says the latest incarnation of the web, dubbed Web 2.0, is prone to the same flaws as its predecessor

[Top 10 Web 2.0 attack vectors are taken as reference]
Read story

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Hacking Web 2.0 Applications with Firefox


AJAX and interactive web services form the backbone of “web 2.0” applications. This technological transformation brings about new challenges for security professionals.

This article looks at some of the methods, tools and tricks to dissect web 2.0 applications (including Ajax) and discover security holes using Firefox and its plugins. The key learning objectives of this article are to understand the:

* web 2.0 application architecture and its security concerns.
* hacking challenges such as discovering hidden calls, crawling issues, and Ajax side logic discovery.
* discovery of XHR calls with the Firebug tool.
* simulation of browser event automation with the Chickenfoot plugin.
* debugging of applications from a security standpoint, using the Firebug debugger.
* methodical approach to vulnerability detection.

Read

Monday, October 09, 2006



On slashdot you can read reviews on HNS article - Top 10 Web 2.0 Attack Vectors

Read

Top 10 Web 2.0 attack vectors


Web 2.0 is the novel term coined for new generation Web applications. start.com, Google maps, Writely and MySpace.com are a few examples. The shifting technological landscape is the driving force behind these Web 2.0 applications. On the one hand are Web services that are empowering server-side core technology components and on the other hand are AJAX and Rich Internet Application (RIA) clients that are enhancing client-end interfaces in the browser itself.

XML is making a significant impact at both presentation and transport (HTTP/HTTPS) layers. To some extent XML is replacing HTML at the presentation layer while SOAP is becoming the XML-based transport mechanism of choice.

More

Friday, August 11, 2006

Book - Hacking Web Services



Web Services are an integral part of next generation Web applications. The development and use of these services is growing at an incredible rate, and so too are the security issues surrounding them. Hacking Web Services is a practical guide for understanding Web services security and assessment methodologies. Written for intermediate-to-advanced security professionals and developers, the book provides an in-depth look at new concepts and tools used for Web services security. Beginning with a brief introduction to Web services technologies, the book discusses Web services assessment methodology, WSDL -- an XML format describing Web services as a set of endpoints operating on SOAP messages containing information -- and the need for secure coding. Various development issues and open source technologies used to secure and harden applications offering Web services are also covered. Throughout the book, detailed case studies, real-life demonstrations, and a variety of tips and techniques are used to teach developers how to write tools for Web services. If you are responsible for securing your company's Web services, this is a must read resource!

More information

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Security Bugs Undercut Mozilla


New flaws leave experts wondering if Mozilla's such a great alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer and Exchange

Read the story

Friday, February 24, 2006

Auscert 2006 - Web Services Hacking...





AusCERT Asia Pacific
Information Technology Security Conference
21st - 26th May 2006 - Royal Pines Resort - Gold Coast, Australia
More info

Dallascon - Adavanced Web Services Hacking...

Presenting paper at Dallascon in first week of May.

DallasCon Information & Wireless Security conference
May 5-6, 2006
Richardson Hotel
Details

Thursday, February 23, 2006

EUSecWest talk...

It was fun to be at EUSecWest. Talks and presentations were good. Justin made good notes on it. You can read it over here.

Day 1
Day 2

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Releasing wschess 1.5

Following changes are included.

+ Few bugs are solved
+ wspawn is now querying Xmethods. UBRs are closed for Microsoft, IBM etc.
+ wsknight has analysis engine in place. You can supply regex patterns and wsaudit will detect them. It will change color of text. Sample rule file is included.

Get it

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Advanced Web Hacking - Attacks & Defense (Upcoming talk)

Abstract:

Attacks to web application layer are on the rise and innovative methodologies, attack vectors and exploits are coming into existence. To combat these threats it is imperative to understand its nature, characteristics and risk to application layer. Some of the new attack vectors are XPATH injection, LDAP poisoning and advanced SQL injection. These vectors are getting popular with XML based web applications. At the same time new methodologies for web application foot printing and discovery are coming to existence with rich search engine information provided by Google & MSN. These methodologies are important to have as a tool to web security professionals. Open source exploit framework like Metasploit can be used effectively for web application exploit development for penetration testers. This presentation will encompass new methodologies, tools and techniques on both the aspects - attacks & defense.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Hacking Web Services: Strategies, Tools, and Methods (Upcoming talk)



Date: Tuesday, 4 April 2006
Time: 3:30pm - 5pm
Track: E-Security



Objectives:
1.)Web services as a new area of attack in the Web application domain
2.)A live demo of a Web services assessment methodology
3.)Understanding the Web protocols UDDI, SOAP and WSDL - the latest means of Web services attacks
4.)Leveraging content filtering and secure coding for Web services
5.)Implementing tools and creating your own tool on the fly while performing your work on Web services, e.g. wsChess

Hacking and Securing .NET (Upcoming talk)



Date: Tuesday, 4 April 2006
Time: 8:30am - 10:45am
Track: Platform Security



Objectives:
1.)Understanding the evolution of Web application from CGI scripts to .Net apps and the security concerns along the way
2.).Net Web application hacking methodology and tools required to perform a thorough assessment.
3.).Net and IIS metabase querying and auditing for overall secure deployment of Web application on the framework
4.)HTTP stack intercept on .Net and leveraging it for application security
5.)Building your own HTTPModule and interface to perform content filtering for Web applications

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

MSNPawn - New tool is coded up.

MSNPawn has been designed and developed on the .Net framework and must be installed on the system. The following utilities have been bundled with MSNPawn.

MSNHostFP - Supply an IP Address or IP Address range to fetch all possible virtual hosts or application running on each IP addresses.

MSNDomainFP - Supply a domain name to fetch the top 50 child domains, considering the supplied domain name as parent.

MSNCrossDomainFP - Supply an application domain to fetch the top 50 domains pointing to this particular domain on the Internet.

MSNCrawler - Supply a domain or application name to fetch all possible links crawled by the search engine.

MSNFetch - Supply a domain and rules file. The tool will run each rule in the file against the domain specified and fetch the first five results of the resultant query. This can help in assessing an application.

Search.MSN - Provides place to run your search against MSN and gather all URLs.

Whitepaper is included for better understanding for all these tools.

[Download]

[Download paper]

Monday, December 12, 2005

Article on web application footprinting [HITB E-zine]



Any search engine database is a very powerful source of information for web applications. The Search Engine’s spiders are well-powered to run frequently on sites and capture all possible links. As an end user, however, we are more interested in the searching interface and criteria these engines provide. By using their search options, end users can craft intelligent queries against a database and fetch critical information. There are several tools out there that query the Google database and fetch this sort of security-related information about web applications.

This paper describes some of the queries that can be run against SEARCH.MSN in order to fetch important information that would eventually help in web application assessment. SEARCH.MSN provides web services APIs to build applications using their search interface.

More information can be gathered from http://search.msn.com/developer/ To be able to use SEARCH.MSN, you will require an Application ID. This can be obtained using MSN passport. Queries are limited to 10,000 a day and allow a total of 50 results for each query. This provides great flexibility to the application. As a security tool, substantial information can be queried from MSN search, making it a handy tool to have in your toolkit. For the examples outlined in this paper, some of the information is retrieved using this interface, with a sample application called wapawn.

Read Here

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Assessing Web App Security with Mozilla (Oreilly)



Web application assessment is a challenging task for security analysts. Several products and tools are available, each claiming to perform automated analysis on entire applications. Their capabilities include obtaining data, corroborating it, and printing aesthetically appealing reports--all without user intervention.

The nature of web applications is very different from that of standard applications. Many times, these tools miss key vulnerabilities in the application. The best way to perform web application assessment is by using the unassailable combination of automated tools and human intellect. This article examines the LiveHTTPHeaders project, which fits seamlessly into Mozilla browser components to facilitate very effective web application assessment.

Read Here

Thursday, October 06, 2005

RSA Europe 2005





Title: WEB SERVICES SECURITY CHESS:STRATEGIES FOR COMBAT AND SHIELDS FOR DEFENSE

Abstract:

Attack is the best way to know your defense. Knowledge of attack methodology, tools and defense strategies are most critical before creating shield for your ultimate defense. This presentation encompasses all three dimensions (Methodology, Tools and Strategies) with innovative researched approach and live demonstrations. UDDI, SOAP and WSDL are pawn, knight and queen of this new chess board.

Objectives:

1.Imparting web services assessment methodology and demonstrate approach with live application. 2.Leveraging tools and creating your own tool on the fly while performing your work on web services. 3.Build ultimate defense for your web services by leveraging content filtering and secure coding for web services.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

OSCON Europe 2005

Open Source Web Application Security Kung-Fu & Art of Defense

Web application attacks are growing at rapid rate in last five years. Many innovative ways of breaking systems have come into existence. Web applications are even more vulnerable since they cannot be protected by firewalls and become easy prey for attackers. Next generation web application attacks have arrived and are here to stay. These attacks are targeted towards vulnerable and poorly written web applications.

Read Here

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Papers appeared on packetstorm...

Paper on browser identification.
Read Here

Paper on domain footprinting.
Read Here

Advisory on ASP.NET
Read Here

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Presenting paper at HackInTheBox 05

Title: Web hacking Kung-Fu and Art of Defense
Abstract:
Web attacks are on the rise and new methods of hacking are evolving. This presentation will cover new methodologies for web application footprinting, discovery and information gathering with a new range of tools.

Web applications are getting exploited using various new injection techniques like advanced SQL injection, LDAP query, XPATH goofing etc. All these new exploit methods will be discussed. The HTTP stack is changing in application frameworks like .NET. The stack can be utilized for defense using HTTP interfaces. Defense methodology for web applications are required to combat new threats emerging in the field.

This will be a deep-knowledge presentation that will be full of live demos, examples and new tools!

Presenting paper at Syscan05

Title: .Net web security – Attacks and Defense
Abstract:
Web security is becoming very critical as .Net framework is evolving. New set of vulnerabilities are coming up at web application level. Web Services are also becoming integral part of web application and creating next generation threat for emerging web application layer. There are new set of methodology is required to attack .Net applications and to provide defense new strategies are evolving. This presentation will brief about both attacks and defense with new set of tools.

Sunday, August 07, 2005

wschess 1.4 released

Some bugs are rectified in this build. These bugs were in following areas
1. wsKnight - SOAP action tag in header and host
2. wsPawn - Parsing error
3. Domain footprinting is removed from wspawn and planning to build a seperate tool.

Thanks for reporting bugs. Few more stuff to be added in next build.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Browser identification on HNS

Paper on browser identification is featured on HNS.

Read Here

Saturday, June 25, 2005

Browser Identification

Paper on browser identification is posted on infosecwriters. Several approaches are defined in this paper.

Read Here

Thursday, June 09, 2005

[Oreilly] Protect your applications without recoding them

Article on Onlamp.

Web services are increasingly becoming an integral part of next-generation web applications. They're also vulnerable to attacks. The nature of these attacks is the same as for traditional web applications, but the modus operandi is different. These attacks can lead to information leakage; further, they aid in remote command execution. By using WSDL, an attacker can determine an access point and available interfaces for web services. These interfaces or methods take inputs using SOAP over HTTP/HTTPS. Without good defense at the source code level, your application is in danger of compromise and exploitation. mod_security operates as an Apache web server module, ideal for defending web services against attacks that also include malicious POST data containing SOAP envelopes.

Go to Onlamp

Monday, June 06, 2005

wschess 1.3 released

wsKnight is updated with 4 new audit/attack vectors. This will help in auditing or testing web services.

1. Bruteforcing - One can specify user/pass fields and map it to files. This will launch bruteforcing combinations on the wire.
2. Buffer overflow - Specify parameter and buffer size.
3. LDAP and XPath injection - This is very simple just a different category.

[Download]
Stay tune more to go.

Cheers!

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Advisory on securitytracker

Recent finding on ASP.NET is posted on security tracker.
Read Here

Monday, May 23, 2005

Domain Footprinting Paper

Featured on HNS and also posted on infosecwriters. The methodology discussed in the paper is implemented in wschess toolkit.
Read Here

OR
Read Here


wschess you can down load from here
Download

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

ASP.NET web services advisory

Microsoft ASP.NET Web Services.
Unhandled exception leads to file system disclosure and SQL injection.
Read Here

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

wschess beta 1.2 release

Changes are as follows

1. Doamin footprinting is added to wspawn. Methodlogy is discussed in paper [Read]
2. wspawn threading is much more controlled now with option to stop.
3. wspawn's command line is also posted which can run under linux with mono.


Planning to add few more audit/attack modules for xpath,xss,ldap etc in wsknight in next release.

Friday, May 13, 2005

Monday, May 09, 2005

Paper appeared on HNS (IHTTPModule for .Net)

Web Application Defense At The Gates – Leveraging IHttpModule
It is featured on HNS.
Read Here