Assessing Authentication Schemes

This chapter covers some basic authentication penetration test cases. For background, authentication is the act of verifying whether a person’s or object’s claim of identity is true. Web penetration testers must make key assessments to determine the strength of a target application’s authentication mechanism. Such tests include username enumeration, guessable accounts, weak lockout mechanisms, authentication bypasses, browser-caching weaknesses, and account provisioning omissions, particularly related to Representational State Transfer (REST) API calls. You will learn how to use Burp Suite to perform such tests.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Testing for account enumeration and guessable accounts
• Testing for weak lockout mechanisms
• Testing for bypassing authentication schemes
• Testing for browser cache weaknesses
• Testing the account provisioning process via the REST API