Exploiting and Securing Vulnerabilities in Java Applications

Overview

In this Exploiting and Securing Vulnerabilities in Java Applications course offered by Coursera in partnership with UC Davis, we will wear many hats. With our Attacker Hats on, we will exploit Injection issues that allow us to steal data, exploit Cross Site Scripting issues to compromise a users browser, break authentication to gain access to data and functionality reserved for the ‘Admins’, and even exploit vulnerable components to run our code on a remote server and access some secrets. We will also wear Defender Hats. We will dive deep in the code to fix the root cause of these issues and discuss various mitigation strategies. We do this by exploiting WebGoat, an OWASP project designed to teach penetration testing. WebGoat is a deliberately vulnerable application with many flaws and we take aim at fixing some of these issues. Finally we fix these issues in WebGoat and build our patched binaries. Together we will discuss online resources to help us along and find meaningful ways to give back to the larger Application Security community.

What you'll learn

• Practice protecting against various kinds of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

• Form plans to mitigate injection vulnerabilities in your web application.

• Create strategies and controls to provide secure authentication.

• Examine code to find and patch vulnerable components.