How to Break Web Software

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.

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 defensive security 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.