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Learning Python Web Penetration Testing
Learning Python Web Penetration Testing

Learning Python Web Penetration Testing: Automate web penetration testing activities using Python

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Learning Python Web Penetration Testing

Interacting with Web Applications

In the previous chapter, we learned about the web application security process and why it is important to test application security. In this chapter, we'll take a look at the following topics:

  • HTTP protocol basics
  • Anatomy of an HTTP request
  • Interacting with a web app using the requests library
  • Analyzing HTTP responses

HTTP protocol basics

In this section, we'll learn about the HTTP protocol, how it works, and the security aspects of it and which methods are supported when performing a request.

This will provide you with the basic knowledge of HTTP, which is important to understand how to build tools and test for security issues in web applications.

What is HTTP and how it works?

HTTP was designed to enable communication between clients and servers.

HTTP is a TCP/IP-based communication protocol operating in the application layer. Normally, we use a web browser to interact with web applications but in this training, we will leave the browser behind and use Python to talk with web applications. This protocol is media independent.

This...

Anatomy of an HTTP request

In this section, we'll take a look at the structure of a URL, the request and response headers, and an example of GET requests using Telnet to understand how it works at a low level.

I bet you have seen thousands of URLs by now. It's now time to stop and think about the URL structure. Let's see what each part means:

The first part is the protocol in web applications. The two protocols used are HTTP and HTTPS. When using HTTP, the port that will be used is 80, and when using HTTPS, the port will be 443.

The next part is the host we want to contact. Next, we can see the resource or the file location in that server. In this example, the directory is content and the resource is section. Then, we have the question mark symbol that indicates what's to come is the query string. These are the parameters that will be passed to the section...

Interacting with a web app using the requests library

In this section, we'll start to write Python code to perform HTTP requests using the requests library.

Requests library

Requests is an Apache 2 licensed HTTP library written in Python. It was created to reduce the complexity and work needed when using urllib2 and other HTTP libraries available at the moment.

This is an example of the code needed to perform a request to api.github.com using authentication when using the urllib2 library:

import urllib2

gh_url = 'https://api.github.com'

req = urllib2.Request(gh_url)

password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
password_manager.add_password(None, gh_url, 'user', 'pass')

auth_manager...
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Key benefits

  • • Understand the web application penetration testing methodology and toolkit using Python
  • • Write a web crawler/spider with the Scrapy library
  • • Detect and exploit SQL injection vulnerabilities by creating a script all by yourself

Description

Web penetration testing is the use of tools and code to attack a website or web app in order to assess its vulnerability to external threats. While there are an increasing number of sophisticated, ready-made tools to scan systems for vulnerabilities, the use of Python allows you to write system-specific scripts, or alter and extend existing testing tools to find, exploit, and record as many security weaknesses as possible. Learning Python Web Penetration Testing will walk you through the web application penetration testing methodology, showing you how to write your own tools with Python for each activity throughout the process. The book begins by emphasizing the importance of knowing how to write your own tools with Python for web application penetration testing. You will then learn to interact with a web application using Python, understand the anatomy of an HTTP request, URL, headers and message body, and later create a script to perform a request, and interpret the response and its headers. As you make your way through the book, you will write a web crawler using Python and the Scrappy library. The book will also help you to develop a tool to perform brute force attacks in different parts of the web application. You will then discover more on detecting and exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities. By the end of this book, you will have successfully created an HTTP proxy based on the mitmproxy tool.

Who is this book for?

Learning Python Web Penetration Testing is for web developers who want to step into the world of web application security testing. Basic knowledge of Python is necessary.

What you will learn

  • Interact with a web application using the Python and Requests libraries
  • Create a basic web application crawler and make it recursive
  • Develop a brute force tool to discover and enumerate resources such as files and directories
  • Explore different authentication methods commonly used in web applications
  • Enumerate table names from a database using SQL injection
  • Understand the web application penetration testing methodology and toolkit

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jun 27, 2018
Length: 138 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789539677
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Product Details

Publication date : Jun 27, 2018
Length: 138 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789539677
Category :
Languages :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
Introduction to Web Application Penetration Testing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Interacting with Web Applications Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Web Crawling with Scrapy – Mapping the Application Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Resources Discovery Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Password Testing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Detecting and Exploiting SQL Injection Vulnerabilities Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Intercepting HTTP Requests Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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2 star 6.1%
1 star 3%
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Amazon Customer Jan 04, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Great book! Great way to learn python and application development. My only suggestion would be to use pyenv as opposed to virtualenv as stated in the book.
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Pradyumna Muppirala Jun 16, 2023
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Shandor Yoav Losonci May 23, 2022
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