Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

This course delves into the exploitation of misconfigured Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policies, demonstrating how they can be used to bypass Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection. You'll understand the fundamentals of the Same-Origin Policy (SOP), which prevents JavaScript on one site from accessing data on another, and how developers often bypass SOP using CORS. The course covers how CORS uses HTTP headers to manage cross-origin requests and the security implications of misconfigurations, such as using wildcards or copying the Origin header from requests into responses.

Through practical exercises, you will learn to identify weak CORS policies and how they can be exploited to reset an administrator's password. The course provides a hands-on approach, guiding you step-by-step to trick a user into making authenticated requests to a vulnerable site, thereby bypassing CSRF protections. By the end, you will be able to manually detect weak CORS configurations and understand the risks they pose in modern web applications.