Understanding Broken Access Control Vulnerabilities and How to Bypass 403 Endpoints
Broken access control vulnerabilities can pose a significant threat to a web application's security. Such vulnerabilities allow unauthorized users to access restricted resources, circumventing the standard security procedures. By exploiting these vulnerabilities, attackers can gain access to sensitive information or systems, resulting in data breaches or other serious security incidents. One of the common ways to prevent unauthorized access is by returning a 403 forbidden response for sensitive endpoints such as .htaccess or config.php. The HTTP 403 Forbidden response status code indicates that the server understands the request but refuses to authorize it. However, if the access control mechanism applied is weak, attackers can bypass the security controls and gain access to restricted resources. In a recent discovery of an IoT service delivery platform, the researcher used directory enumeration with dirbuster wordlists and found a /console endpoint that returned a 403 response. Th...