become a hacker with webgoat

WebGoat is a insecure web application which is designed to teach web application security concepts.
You can try hacking: Access Control Flaws, Authentication Flaws, Session Management Flaws, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Buffer Overflows, Injection Flaws, Improper Error Handling, Insecure Storage, Denial of Service, Insecure Configuration, Web Services and AJAX Security.

There is a “Lesson Plan” a kind of tutorial and in the “Hints Menu” you can view the parameters, cookies, the Code and the solution.
It’s a lot of fun and you learn more about web application security.

hide your JavaScript

If there is a reason why you don’t want humans to read your JavaScript code, you can use the packer from
http://dean.edwards.name/packer/ to obfuscated it (online).

The packer compress the code to one line, deletes all comments and has the option to encode it with Base62. You can put the generated code in your code, it should work with any browser.
You must correctly terminate all JavaScript statements with semi-colons.

Here an example script and the output from the packer:

playing with a backdoor

I played last night with a backdoor shell that I found on the net and will show you how this works and how you can find traces if you are the system administrator.

I used 2 vm’s (virtual machines), both based on Debian/Linux one called “victim” it simulates the cracked server where the backdoor runs and the other box called “hacky” where the bad guy is sitting in front :)

The first step of the bad guy is to start a server that listens on some port (12345) on his box, a good program for this is netcat, the command could be something like: netcat -l -p 12345

hardening the famous PHP-CMS Joomla!

I’m not a big fan of Joomla! but a client wanted to use it and so I had a closer look on it, to make it a bit securer.
For the moment I work with the 1.0.14 version and read that the Joomla1.5 work with safe mode on and has some nice security features.
Here are some tips which you can also use if you aren’t a Joomla head.

hide your php source code (expired)

I’m a big fan of the open source philosophy but sometimes it’s useful to have an unreadable binary source code.
In this posting i will show you how to use and how to install bcompiler to encode your scripts in phpbytecode, enabling you to protect the source code.

.htaccess tips and tricks

.htaccess (hypertext access) is the default name of Apache’s directory-level configuration file. .htaccess is placed in a particular directory, and the directives in the .htaccess file apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof.

The most common feature is to restrict access to a folder by force the user to a login prompt, but there are some other helpful things also that I show you in this posting.

Automated testing with Selenium IDE

Automated testing is an extremely useful bug-killing tool for the modern Web developer and a lot of vulnerability in fact are based on bugs.
With Selenium IDE, a free Firefox extension, you can easily record your clicks and inputs in the browser, set tests and replay the records. If a test failed you get a feedback.

I’ll show you an example, to make the power of Selenium clearer.

Subversion a security risk?

Subversion allows users to keep track of changes made to source code. It’s very handy and many developers use it everyday, like me.

Some websites have a svn checkout in their public web folder to make faster updates if code change.

Letting the cat out of the bag right now: If the webserver has directory listening on, it’s easy to spy parts of your website.
If you take a closer look to the structure of Subversion you will notice that Subversion creates on every folder a subfolder called “.svn” with some files.

A example is a webshop which uses Subversion on the web server.

The start site of the webshop

Pixy: XSS and SQLI Scanner for PHP Programs

Pixy is a free Java program that performs automatic scans of PHP 4 source code, aimed at the detection of Cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection (SQLI) vulnerabilities. Pixy takes a PHP program as input, and creates a report that lists possible vulnerable points in the program, together with additional information for understanding the vulnerability.

There is also a easy to use webinterface where you can upload your files or paste the code to analyse it.

http://pixybox.seclab.tuwien.ac.at/pixy/webinterface.php

Is this application written in php or not?

Some sites use mod-rewrite or change .php extensions to .html extensions with .htaccess to hide the information that the application is written with php.

But it’s really easy to find out if it’s written with php, because there is an Easter egg in php. If you send a special string to any php site, the browser generates a php logo or a dog as image.