A colleague of mine asked me a few days ago, what he can do with an XSS on a BitTorrent Tracker site. The most obvious thing was of course to steal a logged in user’s session ID to get access to his account data which contains for example his “Private Tracker” login credentials and so [...]

(According to the following blog posting, be aware of that I’ve never bypassed any authorization mechanism, nor did I break, access or change anything I was not allowed to.) Last weekend, I went snowboarding in the Swiss mountains and the weather including the snow was just perfect. Because the winter sport season hasn’t started yet, [...]

Today I was playing around with the well known password cracking tool John the Ripper (JtR) and was looking forward to crack some MD5 hashes. Unfortunately, John still not supports raw-MD5 out of the box and so I was searching the web for a solution. It took me some minutes until I found out, that [...]

What is it about? This blog posting describes a way on how you can patch security problems and real vulnerabilities in your PHP code, when you’re not allowed to change the code or for example if this is just not possible for any reason. What you’ll learn here is something like virtual patching, as we [...]

Long time ago I said, that we’ll run into the same security problems we already started to fix in our web applications at the point, where we start using AJAX aka. Web 2.0 stuff. For example XSS is well known in the web development since a while and many developer try to avoid such vulnerabilities [...]

A few days ago, I’ve got the following Mail (it’s in German): Hallo, das warst doch du, der unser Sprachportal (MobiLingua, Uni Passau) über das Forum gehackt hat und mir damit einen gehörigen Schrecken eingejagt hat, oder? Jedenfalls danke für den Hinweis – das ist halt der Nachteil von CMS: Man kann zwar mit relativ [...]

The topic of web application security is definitely a new topic, if we compare it for example to network security or something like cryptography but in all of this thematics, it’s important to give newcomers the basics because if they don’t have them, they’ll never be able to become good in what they’re going to [...]

Last week I was at the Security-Zone 2007, which is the most important security related event we’ve got here in Switzerland (and it’s by the way absolutely for free). At this event Hans-Peter Waldegger and I had a talk in the name of the OWASP Switzerland Local Chapter, which was focused on structured application security [...]

I finished this paper about one month ago but I had to clarify some stuff with my employer Dreamlab Technologies Ltd. Now everything’s clear and I can publish my paper about an attack type I call XSIO – Cross Site Image Overlaying. It’s about something which I think many of you have already done but [...]

Normally I don’t like to do advertisement in my blog, especially not for companies. This time I’ll do it as an exception because Dreamlab Technologies Ltd., the company I’m working for has released a good paper about the next ten big security problems, we’ll probably run into in the near feature. I also gave my [...]