RE: WebAppSec Training Courses in UK

With respect I think your description of security assessment training is woefully inadequate in todays world. Penetration testing is a snapshot at best and a time trial at worst. Having ran some teams for some well known consulting companies in the past I know all to well the business model and why its pushed so hard by them. Now working in corporate America I also see why we the clients (yeah we as in my company and others at like minded user groups who surprisingly do talk) are getting very frustrated with some security consulting companies and training companies.

<rant>
Firstly there is little accountability. Its perceived as an art and not a science and therefore you really have little confidence that all of the things that should have been tested were. Secondly with 78% of attacks being from insiders (see FBI reports) , looking at the hard crunchy outside is of little value. Too many companies reports read “High Vulnerability – Parameter tampering”. After the sticker shock you read between the lines and find out you can change the page color and they have made an incredible leap of faith from that to saying you “may” be able to login in with another users username. An indicator of parameter tampering in one place can lead to it in another. It’s the consulting fluff syndrome. You’ve all heard it before I am sure. “These sessionID’s don’t look random”. Well test the randomness if you have a math degree! If not look for the source of randomness and if /urandom is used then call it out. </rant>

Someone once used a great analogy. If you’re testing for cancer would you take someone’s temperature? Would you look at their eyeballs? Hell No! Get them on the cat scan machine. Even if the eyeballs are dilated and you can tell theyre ill, you still need to locate the problem (offending code) to treat it.

One of the things I liked when I spoke to the OWASP testing people was how they are going to cover what I think should be included in a web application security testing methodology. In a structured meaningful test you need to firstly sit down and understand the security requirements. How can you ever say there is a problem unless you know the requirements and how it should be? Secondly you need to understand the application architecture. That’s an assessment in itself! How are people using JNDI, LDAP JMS <insert architecture component of choice here>. People are finally realizing that XSS is easily cured with a proper architecture;-) You don’t fix it tactically, you fix it strategically.

Then there is a technical assessment which is where most people think the pen test comes in. But think of this. My requirements have shown that sessions timeout after 20 mins and my architecture review shows I use the servlet container config (server.xml) to do it and the controller servlet to enforce it. I can sit there with a perl script and make a request every 21 mins to each url (dumb in my opinion) or I can parse web.xml and server.xml for the config. Ones a much more effective way to technically test the requirements have been implemented IMHO. A pen test may have a place in ensuring that stuffs functioning as it should be that’s where it belongs again IMHO, flamesOff(security, architect).

And then there’s a security source code review, a web application security management review (what happens when it goes down, who reviews logs, what policy exists to manage the security of the application).

Web application security assessment is far more than a pen test. They are prevalent because consulting companies can pull the wool of clients eyes with buzz words and hacker speak, not to mention the business model that works well for the consulting companies. If you pay 40K for a hit and run that’s good business. But if you fix the first hole and have to pay $40K for the next then its not economical and the client will soon feel ripped of.

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And why does this relate to training? Well people IMHO need to be trained that web application security assessment consists of many things not just how to own a web server in 20 mins or how to test for XSS from the outside. Assess strategically not tactically. Asses how security is baked into the development process and not just in a deployment scenario.

On Tue, 03 Dec 2002 01:54:14 -0800 Glyn Geoghegan <glyn.geoghegan@corsaire.com> wrote:
>You also need to determine whether the training you want is

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