Security: Hacking Web 2.0 Applications with Firefox

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: October 13, 2006]

Shreeraj Shah has published an article at SecurityFocus.

AJAX and interactive web services form the backbone of "web 2.0" applications. This technological transformation brings about new challenges for security professionals.

This article looks at some of the methods, tools and tricks to dissect web 2.0 applications (including Ajax) and discover security holes using Firefox and its plugins. The key learning objectives of this article are to understand the:

=> web 2.0 application architecture and its security concerns.
=> hacking challenges such as discovering hidden calls, crawling issues, and Ajax side logic discovery.
=> discovery of XHR calls with the Firebug tool.
=> simulation of browser event automation with the Chickenfoot plugin.
=> debugging of applications from a security standpoint, using the Firebug debugger.
=> methodical approach to vulnerability detection.