Tuesday, March 29, 2005

HITB videos

Dhillon has just posted HITB videos on his site for HITB2004.
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Monday, March 28, 2005

Web Services: Enumeration and Profiling (Whitepaper)

Web services assessment can begin with a corporate name or some other such bit of information. This simple hint offers a wealth of information that needs to be unearthed. Focus first on locating single or multiple access points for a particular corporate. The methodology, which includes web services footprinting, discovery and search, is described in another paper (http://packetstormsecurity.org/papers/web/Defense_using_mod_security.pdf). Once an access point for a web service is uncovered, the next obvious step is to extract information from it.

Web services are deployed to invoke remote calls over HTTP/HTTPS. To make calls such as these, requires that information about the calls be shared with the end client. In the past, during the days of CORBA, developers used to share IDL (Interface Definition Language) files providing the required information over the network. Now, in the days of web services this has changed to WSDL (Web Services Definition Language). WSDL is a major source for information and can help in the enumeration process. We shall go over the enumeration process in subsequent sections.
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Monday, March 21, 2005

Web application defense at the gates – Leveraging IHttpModule (Whitepaper)

Web applications are vulnerable to many attacks, mainly due to poor input validation at the source code level. Firewalls can block access to ports but once a web application goes live and TCP ports 80 and 443 are accessible, the web application can be an easy prey for attackers. HTTP traffic is legitimate traffic for web applications; all the more reason to include application-level content-filtering over unencrypted and encrypted communication channels. Application-level content filtering is possible to some extent but may not work over HTTPS (port 443). The only way to provide a strong defense is by applying powerful content-filtering at the application-level for both TCP port 80 and TCP port 443.

The .Net framework with ASP.NET provides the IHttpModule interface access to HTTP pipes - the lowest of programming layers - before an incoming HTTP request hits the web application. This can provide defense at the gates. In this paper, we look at how one can build this sort of defense in all three aspects - coding, deployment and configuration.
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