Preventing State-Based Attacks of Web Applications
What’s In This Chapter?
The concept of state, or the ability to remember information as a user travels from page to page within a site, is an important one for Web testers. The Web is stateless in the sense that it does not remember which page a user is viewing or the order in which pages may be viewed. A user is always free to click the Back button or to force a page to reload. Thus, developers of Web applications must take it upon themselves to code state information so they can enforce rules about page access and session management. This chapter contains a series of attacks that will help determine if your Web application does this important task correctly and securely.
This chapter presents the most common and notorious Web vulnerabilities.