Testing: Introduction and objectives

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OWASP Testing Guide v2 Table of Contents

This Chapter describes the OWASP Web Application Penetration testing methodology and explains how to test each vulnerabilities.

What is a Web Application Penetration Testing?
A penetration test is a method of evaluating the security of a computer system or network by simulating an attack. A Web Application Penetration Test focuses only on evaluating the security of a web application.
The process involves an active analysis of the application for any weaknesses, technical flaws or vulnerabilities. Any security issues that are found will be presented to the system owner together with an assessment of their impact and often with a proposal for mitigation or a technical solution.

What is a vulnerability?

Given an application owns a set of assets (resources of value such as the data in a database or on the file system), a vulnerability is a weakness on a asset that makes a threat possible. So a threat is a potential occurrence that may harm an asset exploiting Vulnerability. A test is an action that tends to show a vulnerability in the application.

Our approach in writing this guide

The OWASP approach is Open and Collaborative:

• Open: every security expert can participate with his experience in the project. Everything is free.
• Collaborative: we usually perform brainstorming before the articles are written. So we can share our ideas and develop a collective vision of the project. That means rough consensus, wider audience and participation.
  

This approach tends to create a defined Testing Methodology that will be:

• Consistent
• Reproducible
• Under quality control
  

The problems that we want to be addressed are:

• Document all
• Test all

We think that is important to use a method to test all the know vulnerabilities and document all the the pen test activities.
What is the OWASP testing methodology?

Penetration testing will never be an exact science where a complete list of all possible issues that should be tested can be defined. Indeed, penetration testing is only an appropriate technique for testing the security of web applications under certain circumstances. The goal is to collect all the possible testing techniques, explain them and keep the guide updated.
The OWASP Web Application Penetration Testing is based on black box approach. The tester know nothing or a few informations about the application to test. The testing model is like this:

• Tester: Who performs the testing activities
• Tools and methodology: The core of this Testing Guide project
• Application: The black box to test

The test is divided in 2 phases:

• Passive mode: in the passive mode the tester try to understand the application's logic, play with the application, a tool can be user for information gathering and HTTP proxy to observe all the HTTP requests and responses. At the end of this phase the tester should understand all the access points (gates) of the application (e.g. Header HTTP, parameters, cookies). For example the tester could find the following:

https://www.example.com/login/Autentic_Form.html

Indicates an authentication form in which the application request a username and a password.
The following parameters represent two access points (gates) to the application.

http://www.example.com/Appx.jsp?a=1&b=1

In this case the application shows two gates (parameters a and b). All the gates found in this phase represent a point of testing. A spreadsheet with the directory tree of the application and all the access points would be useful for the second phase.

• Active mode: in this phase the tester begin to test using the methodology described in the follow paragraphs.

We have splitted the test in 8 sub-categories:

• Information Gathering
• Business logic testing
• Authentication Testing
• Session Management Testing
• Data Validation Testing
• Denial of Service Testing
• Web Services Testing
• AJAX Testing

Here is the list of test that we will explain in the next paragraphs:

Category	Ref Number	Name
Information Gathering	OWASP-IG-001	Application Fingerprint
	OWASP-IG-002	Application Discovery
	OWASP-IG-003	Spidering and googling
	OWASP-IG-004	Analysis of error code
	OWASP-IG-005	SSL/TLS Testing
	OWASP-IG-006	DB Listener Testing
	OWASP-IG-007	File extensions handling
	OWASP-IG-008	Old, backup and unreferenced files
Business logic testing	OWASP-BL-001	Testing Business logic
Authentication Testing	OWASP-AT-001	Default or guessable account
	OWASP-AT-001	Brute Force
	OWASP-AT-001	Bypassing authentication schema
	OWASP-AT-001	Directory traversal/file include
	OWASP-AT-001	Vulnerable remember password and pwd reset
	OWASP-AT-001	Logout and Browser Cache Management Testing
Session Management Testing		Session Management Schema
		Session Token Manipulation
		Exposed Session Variables
		Session Riding
		HTTP Exploit
Data Validation Testing		Cross site scripting
		HTTP Methods and XST
		SQL Injection
		Stored procedure injection
		ORM Injection
		LDAP Injection
		XML Injection
		SSI Injection
		XPath Injection
		IMAP/SMTP Injection
		Code Injection
		OS Commanding
		Buffer overflow
		Incubated vulnerability
Denial of Service Testing		Locking Customer Accounts
		User Specified Object Allocation
		User Input as a Loop Counter
		Writing User Provided Data to Disk
		Failure to Release Resources
		Storing too Much Data in Session
Web Services Testing		XML Structural Testing
		XML content-level Testing
		HTTP GET parameters/REST Testing
		Naughty SOAP attachments
		Replay Testing
AJAX Testing		AJAX Vulnerabilities

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OWASP Testing Guide v2

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