How to Research & Reverse Web Vulnerabilities 101

[carlospolop]

🤖 Automated Content Update

This PR was automatically generated by the HackTricks News Bot based on a technical blog post.

📝 Source Information

• Blog URL: https://projectdiscovery.io/blog/how-to-research-web-vulnerabilities
• Blog Title: How to Research & Reverse Web Vulnerabilities 101
• Suggested Section: Pentesting Web -> Web Vulnerabilities Methodology (add a subsection like 'Reversing & Researching Web CVEs: Patch Diffing and Runtime Debugging')

🎯 Content Summary

This post is a hands-on methodology guide for researching, reversing, and validating web vulnerabilities (primarily CVEs), not a single exploit write-up. It explains how to reconstruct vulnerable environments, instrument them for debugging, diff patched vs vulnerable versions, derive the vulnerable primitive, and finally encode safe, automatable detections (e.g., Nuclei templates).

1. Understanding the environment & stack
Research begins by identifying th...

🔧 Technical Details

Patch-diff-driven CVE reversing workflow
When only binaries (e.g., JARs) are available, reconstruct vulnerable and patched source trees and use decompilers plus Git to pinpoint security changes. For Java, extract vulnerable.jar and patched.jar, decompile both with jadx into vulnerable-src/ and patched-src/, copy vulnerable-src/ into a repo/ directory, initialize Git and commit as the baseline, then overwrite with patched-src/ via rsync -a --delete ../patched-src/ ., commit again, and run git --no-pager diff HEAD~1 HEAD > ../patch.diff. Analyze patch.diff for changes in input validation, new checks, callsites, and helper functions to infer the missing guard or unsafe assumption, then design payloads that exploit the pre-patch condition.

Runtime debugging to trace request-to-sink paths
U...

🤖 Agent Actions

Summary:

• Added a comprehensive “Reversing & Researching Web CVEs” section to the Web Vulnerabilities Methodology page, covering environment recreation, language-specific remote debugging workflows, patch-diffing steps, CVE triage heuristics, safe PoC design, Nuclei template hardening, and structured knowledge management.
• Included concrete JDWP, Node, and patch-diff command snippets plus actionable checklists derived from the referenced research to keep the guidance practical.
• Created a References section citing the ProjectDiscovery article used for the update.

Testing:

• Not applicable (documentation update).

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This PR was automatically created by the HackTricks Feed Bot. Please review the changes carefully before merging.

[carlospolop]

🔗 Additional Context

Original Blog Post: https://projectdiscovery.io/blog/how-to-research-web-vulnerabilities

Content Categories: Based on the analysis, this content was categorized under "Pentesting Web -> Web Vulnerabilities Methodology (add a subsection like 'Reversing & Researching Web CVEs: Patch Diffing and Runtime Debugging')".

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