Passive discovery
In the first section of this chapter, we will investigate various methods of the passive discovery of APIs. Not surprisingly, the techniques involve utilizing different search engines or online repositories to mine useful API metadata.
The finer details of a passive discovery phase will be determined by the target in mind. Sometimes the intent will be to search far and wide (for example, try and identify all APIs that an organization owns) and gain as much information as possible about the number of exposed targets available on the public internet. For example, let’s imagine you are attempting to exploit the API of a new router with a vulnerability—in this case, you will probably be attempting to find online instances with public IP addresses.
In other scenarios, you may know about a particular exploit and want to gain a deeper knowledge of using the exploit in practice. You might use a more narrow and deep strategy (for example, identify only...
