Network Security Tools

Making an HTTP Request

This brings us to our next subroutine, makeRequest , which is responsible for making the actual requests during our scanning. As you can see in the last piece of code, the makeRequest subroutine is called to make the request, and it returns two variables (the status code and the response content). Let’s jump down to this subroutine and take a closer look at exactly what is happening.

makeRequest subroutine

This subroutine is used to make each request we want to generate while testing the application. Keep in mind that this routine is not responsible for manipulating the request for testing purposes; it merely accepts a request and returns the response. Manipulating data for testing occurs outside of this subroutine, depending on the test being performed.

We need to consider several things here, specifically the inputs and outputs of the routine. Because we have already developed a fairly simple and consistent format for storing requests in our input file, it makes sense to pass off requests to this routine using the same syntax. As such, this subroutine expects one variable to be passed to it that contains an HTTP request in the same format as our input log entries. The output requirements for this routine will directly depend on the information we need to identify, regardless of whether the test is successful. At a minimum, the request body (typically HTML) is returned so that we can analyze the contents of the response output. In addition to the response ...