I was lucky enough to do a penetration test on applications using Direct Web Remoting (DWR), and I would like to share my experiences. It is another interesting technology in the wild jungle of the web frameworks and libraries. It defines itself as follows:
“DWR is a Java library that enables Java on the server and JavaScript in a browser to interact and call each other as simply as possible.”
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In the ocean of web application development frameworks there are a quite a few which tries to create rich web application in the same way as traditional desktop-based applications. One of them is the open-source Echo Web Framework from NextApp. It is a Java based system which is kind of practical because everybody has at least one Java developer friend. The Echo applications can be deployed in most of the Java web containers. But the most important difference is that instead of creating for instance a .jsp file to create a view the developer write only things like window.add(button);. That means that for the developer should not care about the fact that his application will be accessed with a web browser. In some way it is really cool that you can just say the words and everything happens automagically but for me it is always a bit weird when I don’t have control over something, but that’s just my taste. And the magic in this case is done by JavaScript. Before going into details I must say that I don’t have full understanding of the Echo Framework and how one should use it properly, I understood it only to be able to do a pentest and to attack it properly. In this post I write about the Echo2 framework and my experiences from the penetration tester’s point of view.
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