Two-day hands-on workshop on Web Security

Dr. Ram Rustagi, the was the resource person who is a consultant for many industries, start-up companies and currently working with Department of CSE, KSIT - Bangalore, as a Professor. In his lecture, on the first day Dr. Ram Rustagi discussed about the HTTP versions, HTTP response status code, HTTPS Protocols and its Authentication. He also discussed about HTTPS communication. He continued with the MITM (Man In The Middle) Attack where in he demonstrated how MITM works and its concepts behind it. He also showed the ways in which MITM can be avoided. Later on he discussed about Content Security Policy which describes the common form of attacks on websites and how an industry must strictly follow it in order to avoid hacking.

Dr. Ram Rustagi

On the second day, Dr. Ram, started with the discussion on the goals of Web Security and common vulnerabilities in Web Applications. He demonstrated Penetration testing and how it works. Then he told us about SQL Injection and precautions to be taken to prevent the same. He also discussed about XSS (Cross Site Scripting), its working and types of attacks. He mentioned about CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) attacks and its vulnerabilities. He also made the young students realise, how to build a software, keeping in mind the security loop holes and technology glitches. He demonstrated the goal and methodologies of the most commonly occurring DoS Attacks (Denial of Service).

A series of exercises were assigned for the students to gain hands-on experience about security breaches. He explained how certain flaws in the software design can lead to major and serious attacks in the information store. He made the students aware of using better technologies for software design and application development, regular updates of OS to fix vulnerabilities and alike. The students were made to work on Kali-Linux, with vitual box installed and make use of powerful terminal commands like nmap, flood, nc etc. The entire exercise was to make the students understand the Web-security & its significance and the serious issues that may occur in the absence of security. The workshop also had a clause that students will use the workshop content for learning and understanding only and will not experiment with any real-world application.