HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

HTTP Flow

Note: Our browsers usually first look up records in the local '/etc/hosts' file, and if the requested domain does not exist within it, then they would contact other DNS servers. We can use the '/etc/hosts' to manually add records to for DNS resolution, by adding the IP followed by the domain name.

cURL

Basic cURL

In this module, we will be sending web requests through two of the most important tools for any web penetration tester, a Web Browser, like Chrome or Firefox, and the cURL command line tool.

curl -h	cURL help menu
curl inlanefreight.com	Basic GET request
curl -s -O inlanefreight.com/index.html	Download file
curl -k https://inlanefreight.com	Skip HTTPS (SSL) certificate validation
curl inlanefreight.com -v	Print full HTTP request/response details
curl -I https://www.inlanefreight.com	Send HEAD request (only prints response headers)
curl -i https://www.inlanefreight.com	Print response headers and response body
curl https://www.inlanefreight.com -A 'Mozilla/5.0'	Set User-Agent header
curl -u admin:admin http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/	Set HTTP basic authorization credentials
curl http://admin:admin@<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/	Pass HTTP basic authorization credentials in the URL
curl -H 'Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46YWRtaW4=' http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/	Set request header
curl 'http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/search.php?search=le'	Pass GET parameters
curl -X POST -d 'username=admin&password=admin' http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/	Send POST request with POST data
curl -b 'PHPSESSID=c1nsa6op7vtk7kdis7bcnbadf1' http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/	Set request cookies
curl -X POST -d '{"search":"london"}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/search.php	Send POST request with JSON data

APIs

curl http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/api.php/city/london	Read entry
curl -s http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/api.php/city/ | jq	Read all entries
curl -X POST http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/api.php/city/ -d '{"city_name":"HTB_City", "country_name":"HTB"}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json'	Create (add) entry
curl -X PUT http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/api.php/city/london -d '{"city_name":"New_HTB_City", "country_name":"HTB"}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json'	Update (modify) entry
curl -X DELETE http://<SERVER_IP>:<PORT>/api.php/city/New_HTB_City	Delete entry