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Web application security : a beginner's guide

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Web Application Security, A Beginner's Guide

Web Application Security Beginner’s Guide

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Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Similar Items Related Subjects: World Wide Web -- Security measures. If a scanner reports a lot of false positives, developers, QA people and security professionals will spend more time verifying the findings rather than focusing on remediations, hence try to avoid it. For more more information about false positives and their negative effect on web application security refer to the article The Problem of False Positives in Web Application Security and How to Tackle Them.

The more a web application security scanner can automate, the better it is. For example imagine a web application with visible input fields, which by today's standards is a small application. If a penetration tester had to manually test each input on the web application for all known variants of cross-site scripting xss vulnerabilities, he would need to launch around different tests.

If each test takes around 2 minutes to complete, and if all works smoothly such test would take around 12 days should the penetration tester work 24 hours a day. And this is just about the visible parameters. And what about the under the hood parameters?

Web Application Security, A Beginner's Guide : Bryan Sullivan : .
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Typically there is much more going on in a web application hidden under the hood rather than what can be seen. Therefore it is difficult for a penetration tester to rapidly identify all attack surfaces of a web application, while an automated web application security scanner can do the same test and identify all "invisible" parameters in around 2 or 3 hours. But it is not just about time and money. When hiring a security professional for a web application penetration test, it will be limited to the professional's knowledge, while on the other hand a typical commercial web application security scanner contains large numbers of security checks and variants backed by years of research and experience.

Therefore automation is another important feature to look for. By automating the security test will cost less and is done more efficiently. For more information about the advantages of automating web application vulnerability detection, refer to Why Web Vulnerability Testing Needs to be Automated. Web application security is something that should be catered for during every stage of the development and design of a web application. The earlier web application security is included in the project, the more secure the web application will be and the cheaper and easier it would be to fix identified issues at a later stage.

For example, an automated web application security scanner can be used throughout every stage of the software development lifecycle SDLC. Even when the web application is in it's early stages of development when it just has a couple of non visible inputs. Testing in the early stages of development is of utmost importance because if such inputs are the base of all other inputs, later on it would be very difficult if not impossible to secure them unless the whole web application is rewritten.

There are also several other advantages to using a vulnerability scanner throughout every stage of the SDLC. For example developers are automatically trained in writing more secure code because apart from just identifying vulnerabilities, most commercial scanners also provide a practical solution to how to fix the vulnerability. This helps developers understand and get to know more about web application security. Scanning a web application with an automated web application security scanner will help you identify technical vulnerabilities and secure parts of the web application itself.

But what about the logical vulnerabilities and all the other components that make up a web application environment? Therefore an automated web application security scan should always be accompanied by manual audit to identify logical vulnerabilities. Logical vulnerabilities could also have a major impact on a business operations therefore it is very important to do a manual analysis of the web application by testing several combinations and ensure that the web application works as it was meant to be.

Imagine a shopping cart that has the price specified in the URL as per the example below: If yes then that is a logical vulnerability that could seriously impact your business.

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No trivia or quizzes yet. In other words, if the budget permits it is of good practise to add a WAF after auditing a web application with a web vulnerability scanner. Janek rated it really liked it Apr 02, Shounak Itraj rated it really liked it Apr 20, Create lists, bibliographies and reviews: When you finish developing your application you have to wait, before deploying it, its a good practice to test its security.

These types of vulnerabilities can never be identified by an automated tool because tools do not have the intelligence that allows them to determine the effect such a parameter could have on the operations of the business. There are several other components in a web application farm that make the hosting and running of a web application possible. All of these components that make up a web server also need to be secure because if any of them is broken into, the malicious attackers can still gain access to the web application and retrieve data from the database or tamper it.

Therefore it is recommended that you to refer to the security guidelines and best practises documentation for the software you are using on your web server. Below are also some basic security guidelines which could be applied to any type of server and network based service:. The more functionality a network service or operating system has, the bigger the chances are of having an exploitable entry point.

Web Application Security, A Beginner's Guide

Therefore switch off and disable any functionality, services or daemons which are not used by your web application environment. For example typically a web server operating system has an SMTP service running. If you are not using such service switch it off and ensure that it is permanently disabled. Ideally administrators should be able to login to the web server locally. It would also be beneficial if you can limit the remote access to a specific number of IP addresses, such as those of the office. Administrators do not typically like any type of restriction on their own accounts because sometimes limited privileges can be a little bit cumbersome to complete a specific task.

Therefore if you work towards finding the right balance between security and practicality, you can have a secure web server while administrators can still do their job. For example an administrators can have different accounts to do different tasks; an account which is specifically used for backups, an account which is used for generic operations such as pruning of log files, an account which is used solely to change the configuration of services such as FTP, DNS, SMTP etc. By using such approach you are limiting the damage that could be done if one of the administrator's account is hijacked by a malicious attacker.

Complementing with user accounts, the same applies for every other type of service and application. For example most of the time the database user your web application is using to connect to the database only needs to read and write data to and from the database and does not need privileges to create or drop tables.

But yet most of the time most administrators give an account all possible privileges because it "will always work". Another typical scenario for this type of problems are ftp users. FTP users which are used to update the files of a web application should only have access to those files and nothing else.

Take the time to analyse every application, service and web application you are running and ensure the least possible privileges are given to the user, application and service.

It is of utmost importance to always segregate live environments from development and testing environments. By mixing such environments you are inviting hackers into your web application. When developing or troubleshooting a web application developers leave traces behind them that could help a malicious hacker to craft an attack against the web application. For example debug, which could be used to expose sensitive information about the environment of the web application is left enabled.

Log files containing sensitive information about the database setup can be left on the website and could be accessed by malicious users. Hence why it is important that any development and troubleshooting is done in a staging environment.

Web Application Security Beginner’s Guide

Similar to the above, the same applies to the data itself. Do not keep non related information in the same database, such as customers credit card numbers and website user activity. Store such data into different databases using different database users. Apply the same segregation concept on the operating system and web application files. After that you can move towards the next process of securing your web application with other methods. To always start with a secure coding process is considered as one of the Web Application Security best practices.

This is a web application security checklist that one must follow while developing any kind of web application. The way of process is given below as it is: In case of web application security, majority of applications are created using various programming languages like PHP, Python etc.

However, instead of these core-language, frameworks are in prosperity. Hence, in those cases, the security comes built-in inside the framework itself. And they usually has their own set-of unique guidelines that developers can follow to build different kind of functionalities in their applications. Web Application Frameworks help you to code difficult application easily, because they have their own set of documentations. And if you code according to that documentation, your development process get completed in a less amount of period.

The frameworks are divided into two categories: Now developers use frameworks belonging to these two categories for developing their web applications. However, as we mentioned earlier these frameworks are also not perfect because they come with their own flaws or drawbacks.