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Hack.LU 2013 CTF Wannabe Writeup Part One: Web Exploitation

Introduction

I attended the Hack.LU conference which took place during 22-24th of October 2013. This conference is well-known for its excellent capture the flag contest created by fluxfingers, which was no different this year.  By the end of the conference, there were 21 published challenges within the fields of crypto, web, reverse engineering, exploiting, internals, and miscellaneous. After completing the fairly easy ‘Pay TV’ and ‘RoboAuth’ challenges during my limited free time on the first and second day (I was attending courses rather than dedicating time to the CTF), I started focusing on a harder challenge in the evening, according to its 400 points reward: ‘Wannabe’. It was categorized as ‘exploiting’ and came with the following description: Continue Reading

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Automated SQL Injection Detection

Introduction

SQL Injection is still a common web application vulnerability these days, despite the fact that it’s already around for ages. The more general ‘Injection’ vulnerability is still at #1 in the OWASP TOP 2013, partly because of the huge risk that is involved – a database usually contains sensitive data that can be leveraged to conduct further attacks, either on the web application layer (privilege escalation) or even the OS layer (remote code execution) when certain prerequisites are met. However, because of limited adoption of best security practices by web application developers and, more importantly, the default use of parameterized queries in popular DB frameworks such as LINQ, SQL Injection is slowly becoming less prevalent in the wild.

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