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.

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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.

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ISACA-UAE - Web Application Workshop ...

One day conference at Dubai on Web Application Security.
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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.

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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

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.

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Ajax scanning on AjaxWorld

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

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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).

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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

Book review - Microsoft Technet

Technet posted book review on Hacking web services
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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.
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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.

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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

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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.

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.

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[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

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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]
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