XVWA is a badly coded web application written in PHP/MySQL that helps
security enthusiasts to learn application security. It’s not advisable
to host this application online as it is designed to be “Xtremely
Vulnerable”. We recommend hosting this application in local/controlled
environment and sharpening your application security ninja skills with
any tools of your own choice. It’s totally legal to break or hack into
this. The idea is to evangelize web application security to the
community in possibly the easiest and fundamental way. Learn and acquire
these skills for good purpose. How you use these skills and knowledge
base is not our responsibility.

XVWA is designed to understand following security issues.

• SQL Injection – Error Based
• SQL Injection – Blind
• OS Command Injection
• XPATH Injection
• Unrestricted File Upload
• Reflected Cross Site Scripting
• Stored Cross Site Scripting
• DOM Based Cross Site Scripting
• Server Side Request Forgery (Cross Site Port Attacks)
• File Inclusion
• Session Issues
• Insecure Direct Object Reference
• Missing Functional Level Access Control
• Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
• Cryptography
• Unvalidated Redirect & Forwards
• Server Side Template Injection

Good Luck and Happy Hacking!

Do not host this application on live or production environment. XVWA is
totally vulnerable application and giving online/live access of this
application could lead to complete compromise of your system. We are not
responsible for any such bad incidents. Stay safe ! 

Instruction

XVWA is hassle-free to setup. You can set this up on windows, linux
or Mac. Following are the basic steps you should be doing on your
Apache-PHP-MYSQL environment to get this working. Let that be WAMP,
XAMP or anything you prefer to use.

Copy the xvwa folder in your web directory. Make sure the directory name remains xvwa itself.

Make necessary changes in xvwa/config.php for database connection. Example below:

$XVWA_WEBROOT = ”;
$host = “localhost”;
$dbname = ‘xvwa’;
$user = ‘root’;
$pass = ‘root’;

Make following changes in PHP configuration file

file_uploads = on
allow_url_fopen = on
allow_url_include = on

Access the application on : http://localhost/xvwa/

Setup the database and table by accessing http://localhost/xvwa/setup/

The login details

admin:admin
xvwa:xvwa
user:vulnerable

Download and read more here