Web Application Defender's Cookbook

Recipe 2-2: Active Vulnerability Identification

This recipe shows you how to use the Arachni web application security framework to dynamically scan your web applications and identify various vulnerabilities.

Ingredients

• Arachni Scanner3

The Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) market is rather large, with both open source and commercial players. As with most security tools, no one tool does everything perfectly. A tool that excels at one task might leave much to be desired in another area. It is recommended that you review the Web Application Security Consortium’s (WASC) Web Application Security Scanner Evaluation Criteria (WASSEC)4 document for guidance on selecting a tool that best suits your specific needs.

For the purposes of this book, we will use an open source DAST tool called Arachni, which was created by Tasos Laskos. Laskos provides this overview of the tool:

Arachni is an open source, feature-full, modular, high-performance Ruby framework aimed toward helping penetration testers and administrators evaluate the security of web applications.

Arachni is smart. It trains itself by learning from the HTTP responses it receives during the audit process. It also can perform meta-analysis using a number of factors to assess the trustworthiness of results and intelligently identify false positives.

Unlike other scanners, Arachni takes into account the dynamic nature of web applications, can detect changes caused while traveling through the paths of a web application’s ...