We’ve tested a number of iOS apps in the last few years, and got to the conclusion that most developers follow the recommendation to use APIs already in the system – instead of reinventing the wheel or unnecessarily depending on third party libraries. This affects HTTP backend APIs as well,...
2016-05-06 — 4 minute readWhen serving image assets, many web developers find it useful to have a feature that scales the image to a size specified in a URL parameter. After all, bandwidth is expensive, latency is killing the mobile web, and letting the frontend guys link to avatar.php?width=64&height=64 pretty straightforward and convenient. However,...
2016-02-10 — 3 minute readSANS Institute accepted my GWAPT Gold Paper about testing stateful web application workflows, the paper is now published in the Reading Room. The paper introduces the problem we’ve been facing more and more while testing complex web applications, and shows two working solutions. Burp Suite is known by most and...
2016-01-15 — 1 minute readDepending on the time spent in IT, most professionals have seen an instance of two where developers based their implementations on specific quirks and other non-standard behaviors, a well-known example is greylisting, another oft-used but less-known one is Wi-Fi band steering. In all these cases, the solution works within a...
2015-10-02 — 3 minute readIntroduction Web application penetration testing is a well researched area with proven tools and methodologies. Still, new techniques and interesting scenarios come up all the time that create new challenges even after a hundred projects. In this case study we start with a relatively simple blind SQL injection situation and...
2015-09-17 — 5 minute readIntroduction This week a Polish bank was breached through its online banking interface. According to the reports the attacker stole 250.000 USD and now uses the personal information of 80.000 customers to blackmail the bank. Allegedly the attacker exploited a remote code execution vulnerability in the online banking application to...
2015-06-19 — 5 minute readMD5 is known to be broken for more than a decade now. Practical attacks have been shown since 2006, and public collision generator tools are also available since that time. The dangers of the developed collision attacks were demonstrated by academia and white-hat hackers too, but in case of the...
2015-06-10 — 3 minute readSANS Institute accepted my GWAPT Gold Paper about testing Oracle Forms applications, the paper is now published in the Reading Room. Forms is a typical example of proprietary technology that back in the day might have looked a good idea from business perspective but years later causes serious headaches on...
2015-05-27 — 1 minute read