Web Application Pentesting with Bash

This chapter explores how to use Bash for web application pentesting. We’ll look at how Bash’s flexibility can help you find vulnerabilities, automate tasks, analyze responses, and manage web data. By the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to use Bash to discover and exploit common web vulnerabilities, extract data efficiently, and integrate with other pentesting tools for a thorough web assessment.

There are generally five use cases for testing web application security:

• Testing a single web application in depth
• Quickly testing (automated scanning) many web applications during a network pentest
• Creating scripts to fuzz for vulnerabilities
• Creating proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) testing

This chapter focuses on the second, third, and fourth use cases. If I were testing in the first use case, I would prefer browser proxies such...