A practical guide for penetration testers & developers.
If you, as a penetration tester, have ever found yourself in a situation where a developer does not take the Misconfigured CORS header observation seriously, or if you, as a developer, have been in a situation where you are not able to understand the actual impact of the Misconfigured CORS observations, then this blog is for you.
You might find this blog a bit lengthy as we start from the basics to cover the concepts of SOP and CORS with the technical details.
So, grab a cup of coffee 🍵& let’s begin.
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Firstly, why are we even talking about cross-origin requests?
In the older days, the entire web app lived at one URL and one server. But now, we build single-page apps (SPA) that fetch data from APIs, use CDNs for assets, rely on third-party login (Google, Facebook), handle payments through Stripe/PayPal, and embed tons of cool widgets.
This is normal. Totally normal. Expected.
For example: