HTTP review

Review

In this module, we used some very common troubleshooting tools to interact with a very simple monolithic web application written using Flask.

  • Netcat was used to better understand how to manually craft http requests
  • Wireshark was used to observe the layer3 and layer4 traffic patterns between the client and server
  • Browser dev tools were used to help students understand how to dig more deeply into the client/server interactions at layer7
  • Finally, we perpetrated a simple web attack, to deface our simple website

Hopefully this engendered a desire on the part of the student to use these tools and techniques to further explore and learn how to secure this type of application.

HTTP Quiz

  1. What is a cookie?

    A small piece of data sent from a server to a user’s web browser

  2. What can you learn from developer tools in the browser?

    • request and response headers
    • scripts passed to the browser from the server
    • cookies and other content
    • response codes

  3. Web attacks are difficult to perpetrate,m and you need to be an inveterate hacker to attempt it (True or False)

    FALSE - The attack in this lab is very simple, but very effective. This should highlight the need to protect web applications with a purpose built Web Application Firewall (WAF)