Archive | October, 2011

The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook

26 Oct

Web applications are the front door to most organizations, exposing them to attacks that may disclose personal information, execute fraudulent transactions, or compromise ordinary users. This practical book has been completely updated and revised to discuss the latest step-by-step techniques for attacking and defending the range of ever-evolving web applications. You’ll explore the various new technologies employed in web applications that have appeared since the first edition and review the new attack techniques that have been developed, particularly in relation to the client side.

  • Reveals how to overcome the new technologies and techniques aimed at defending web applications against attacks that have appeared since the previous edition
  • Discusses new remoting frameworks, HTML5, cross-domain integration techniques, UI redress, framebusting, HTTP parameter pollution, hybrid file attacks, and more
  • Features a companion web site hosted by the authors that allows readers to try out the attacks described, gives answers to the questions that are posed at the end of each chapter, and provides a summarized methodology and checklist of tasks

Focusing on the areas of web application security where things have changed in recent years, this book is the most current resource on the critical topic of discovering, exploiting, and preventing web application security flaws.

Form, Context, Fit

14 Oct

The ultimate object of design is form.

The form is the solution to the problem.

The context defines the problem.

The form is a diagram of forces.

What does make design a problem in a real world case is that we are trying to make a diagram for forces whose field we do not understand.

Understanding the field of the context and inventing a form to fit it are really two aspects of the same process.

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed, and a context which we cannot properly describe.

The measure of a design is how well it fits into the world around it.

In the unselfconscious culture the same form is made over and over again; in order to learn form-making, people need only learn to repeat a single familiar physical form.

In the selfconscious culture new purposes are occurring all the time.

A culture is unselfconscious if its form-making is learned informally, thorough imitation and correction.

A culture is selfconscious if its form-making is taught academically, according to explicit rules.

An unselfconscious culture made beautiful crafts by standing in the long tradition, and by making minor changes whenever something seemed to need improvement.

Here is the problem. We wish to design clearly conceived forms which are well adapted to some given context.

Finding the right design program for a given problem is the first phase of the design process. (The analytical phase of the process)

The starting point of analysis is the requirement. The end product of analysis is a program, which is a tree of sets of requirements.

The starting point of synthesis is the diagram. The end product of synthesis is the realization of the problem.

The constructive diagram can describe the context, and it can describe the form.

The form’s basic organization is born precisely in the constructive diagrams which precede its design.

Review for Notes on the Synthesis of Form by by Christopher  Alexander