CertPal

I came across an interesting application today. Google has released an application named Jarlsberg that is full of security holes. The intent is to make developers learn how these holes work and put them in a position to combat the security vulnerabilities.

You can visit the app to learn more. Security flaws to be detected are classified under the following categories

• Black box. You dont know the code
• White box. Requires you to see the code to understand how to break it.
• Gray box. Some code will be made visible.

I also came across an instructor’s guide that has problems to be solved in the application, graded by their difficulty level.

What better way to learn an exploit than to perform it on a test system ? Some of the exploits involve

• XSS and related challenges
• Path traversal exploits
• DOS

There are times when you work with SSL traffic. Your website might be protected with a certificate so that traffic between you and the client is secure. At times like this, being a developer is troublesome. Browser cache settings need to be analyzed by looking at the HTTP headers. Encoding / Content type may need to be analyzed to ensure that a particular page is displayed correctly. These things cannot be looked into if the traffic is secure. There are situations under which the environment is secure but you must still sniff the data. So how do you manage this ?

Tools like Charles (A debugging proxy) help you do this. Charles allows you to proxy to a secure connection over a protocol like HTTPS and still read the traffic. So how does it do this ? Lets have a look.

Let me begin this post by saying that I am not writing this so that you can read this and become a haCkEr. I am writing this post so you can learn to identify a vulnerability and try to avoid an embarrassment.

Google is an amazing search engine. The problem is that it is too good at what it does sometimes Here are some ways that google can reveal vulnerabilities on your website by mistake.

You allowed google to index a critical file:

This happens more often than you think. WordPress for example houses important files under the wp-* folders and it is no one’s business except yours to look at these files. Other files like .htaccess htpasswd are critical to your site’s security (if you are using apache and ‘allow overrides’). Do not allow google to index them. You can prevent that by placing a robots.txt file on the root path of your website. More on that here.