Sailor Security

My OSWA Certification Exam

Table of Contents

  1. About OSWA
  2. OSWA Content & Skill Mastery
  3. Exam Preparation
  4. Exam
  5. Tips

About OSWA

OSWA (Offensive Security Web Assessor) certification is offered by OffSec same provider as OSCP certification. OSWA is mainly focused on Web Attacks with a black box approach/methodology to conduct the penetration tests on targets.

OSWA Content & Skill Mastery

OSWA has 9 main domains covered both the theory and extensive hands-on labs (Flag Submission Style) on each topic followed by a real-life vulnerability case study. In addition to 8 challenge labs that are both realistic and difficult to pwn.

  1. Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
  2. Cross-Origin Attacks (CSRF and CORS)
  3. SQL injection
  4. Directory Traversal Attacks
  5. XML External Attacks (XXE)
  6. Server-Side Template Injection (SSTI)
  7. Command Injection
  8. Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
  9. Insecure Direct Object Referencing (IDOR)

For more details: www.offsec.com/documentation/WEB-200-Syllabus.pdf

Exam Preparation

Studied and watched the OSWA content and done all the labs (including the challenge labs) twice – repetition reinforces the topic understanding. In addition, leveraged HacktheBox and TryHackMe platforms to practice the above topics for further skill mastery.

Exam

OSWA is exam is similar OSCP exam, it is 48 hours.

The first part (24 hours) is to conduct an assessment against the 5 web applications using the techniques taught in OSWA. The goal is to detect vulnerabilities reside in the application and leveraging them to access Local.txt and Proof.txt as flags.

The second part (24 hours) is to write a professional report on each application to include methodology, vulnerabilities, reproducible steps, and findings. For more: https://help.offsec.com/hc/en-us/articles/4410105650964-WEB-200-Foundational-Web-Application-Assessments-with-Kali-Linux-OSWA-Exam-Guide

Tips

  1. “Use the right tool for the job” S1ren. Understand the target, use the right tool, and wordlist.
  2. Seclist and PayloadofAllTheThings is mostly what is needed.
  3. * Have an eagle eye and a critical mind. Question everything in the application as “why this is here and how it functions”, it will go a long way.
  4. Good night sleep before the exam.
  5. Regular breaks during the exam.