Black Hat GraphQL

Dolev Farhi is a security engineer and author of Black Hat Bash (No Starch Press, forthcoming in 2025). He has extensive experience leading security engineering teams in the Fintech and cybersecurity industries and is currently a distinguished security engineer at Palo Alto Networks, where he builds defenses for the largest cybersecurity company in the world. He has provided training for official Linux certification tracks and, in his spare time, enjoys researching vulnerabilities in IoT devices and building open source offensive security tools.


Nick Aleks is a leader in Toronto's cybersecurity community and a distinguished and patented security engineer, speaker, and researcher. He is currently the Senior Director of Security at Wealthsimple, leads his own security firm, ASEC.IO, and is a Senior Advisory Board member for HackStudent, George Brown, and the University of Guelph s Master of Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence programs. A founder of DEFCON Toronto, he specializes in offensive security and penetration testing and has over 10 years of experience hacking everything from websites, safes, locks, cars, drones, and even smart buildings.

Written by hackers for hackers, this hands-on book teaches penetration testers how to identify vulnerabilities in apps that use GraphQL, a data query and manipulation language for APIs adopted by major companies like Facebook and GitHub.

Black Hat GraphQL is for anyone interested in learning how to break and protect GraphQL APIs with the aid of offensive security testing. Whether you re a penetration tester, security analyst, or software engineer, you ll learn how to attack GraphQL APIs, develop hardening procedures, build automated security testing into your development pipeline, and validate controls, all with no prior exposure to GraphQL required.

Following an introduction to core concepts, you ll build your lab, explore the difference between GraphQL and REST APIs, run your first query, and learn how to create custom queries.

You ll also learn how to:

• Use data collection and target mapping to learn about targets  
• Defend APIs against denial-of-service attacks and exploit insecure configurations in GraphQL servers to gather information on hardened targets
• Impersonate users and take admin-level actions on a remote server
• Uncover injection-based vulnerabilities in servers, databases, and client browsers
• Exploit cross-site and server-side request forgery vulnerabilities, as well as cross-site WebSocket hijacking, to force a server to request sensitive information on your behalf
• Dissect vulnerability disclosure reports and review exploit code to reveal how vulnerabilities have impacted large companies

This comprehensive resource provides everything you need to defend GraphQL APIs and build secure applications. Think of it as your umbrella in a lightning storm.

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Primer on GraphQL
Chapter 2: Setting Up a GraphQL Security Lab
Chapter 3: The GraphQL Attack Surface
Chapter 4: Reconnaissance
Chapter 5: Denial of Service
Chapter 6: Information Disclosure
Chapter 7: Authentication and Authorization Bypasses
Chapter 8: Injection
Chapter 9: Request Forgery and Hijacking
Chapter 10: Disclosed Vulnerabilities and Exploits
Appendix A: GraphQL API Testing Checklist
Appendix B: GraphQL Security
Resources
Index