Directory Traversal Attack (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. A directory traversal consists in exploiting insufficient security validation / sanitization of user-supplied input file names, so that characters representing "traverse to parent directory" are passed through to the file APIs. The goal of this attack is to order an application to access a computer file that is not intended to be accessible. This attack exploits a lack of security as opposed to exploiting a bug in the code. Directory traversal is also known as the ../ attack, directory climbing, and backtracking. Some forms of this attack are also canonicalization attacks.