Burp Suite : Integrated platform for Web Application Security

1.   Burp Suite is an excellent easy-to-use integrated platform for web application security that includes multiple tools seamlessly integrated to test every component and aspect of modern web applications. Whether you need to verify the robustness of your authentication mechanism, the predictability of your session tokens, or the input validation checkpoints present in your application, Burp is often compared to Swiss-army knife for security practitioners since it offers a horde of features . Not only does it allow in-depth manual assessments, but it also combines automated techniques to enumerate and analyze web application resources.Burp has been developed by PortSwigger Ltd. and is available in two editions:

- Burp Free

- Burp Professional

In-fact,the free version is perfect to start for beginners as it contains all the basic tools to find at least few first vulnerabilities.In its simplest way to explain, Burp is a local web proxy that allows to intercept, inspect, and modify HTTP/S requests and responses between the user's browser and the target website. While the user navigates through the web application, the tool acquires details on all visited pages, scripts,parameters, and other components. The traffic between the browser and the server can be eventually visualized, analyzed, modified, and repeated multiple times. The different tools included in Burp Suite can be easily distinguished by the upper tabs:

- Proxy: It allows to intercept and modify all web traffic.

- Target: This tool allows to aggregate all web application resources, thus guiding the user throughout the security test.

- Scanner: A complete web application security scanner, available in the Professional version only.

- Intruder: Burp Intruder allows to customize and automate web requests. 

- Spider: Automatic crawler that can be used to discover new pages and parameters.

- Sequencer: Used for verifying the randomness and predictability of security tokens, cookies, and more.

- Decoder: It allows to encode and decode data using multiple encoding schemes 

- Comparer: A visual diff tool that can be used to detect changes between web pages.

- Repeater: A simple yet powerful tool that can be used to manually modify and re-issue web requests.

How to go about Installation ?

- A minimum disk space of at least 200 MB is required.

- Required memory is at least 1 GB

- Burp Suite works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux

- Software components: An updated Oracle Java Runtime Environment is required to run Burp Suite. 

Downloading Burp Suite from ?

Download link at http://www.portswigger.net/burp/download.html

In the download folder where typically this file gets downloaded,create a burpsuite folder and mov this file to this folder for executing.

Launching Burp Suite in Linux

At the terminal type the following inside the pwd as the new burpsuite folder u created above :

java -Xmx2g -jar burpsuite_v1.4.01.jar

Zenmap:GUI for NMAP@Kali Linux

1.     Most of us would have heard of the pretty famous Nmap ("Network Mapper") ,a free and open source (license) utility for network discovery and security auditing.It uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services those hosts are offering, what operating systems they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. Designed to rapidly scan large networks Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems.Official binary packages are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. In addition to the classic command-line Nmap executable, the Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, redirection, and debugging tool (Ncat), a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff), and a packet generation and response analysis tool (Nping).In this post the focus will be to introduce Zenmap...a kind of GUI for running NMAP commands which is otherwise terminal based.

2.   To open Zenmap, go to the Backtrack menu. Navigate to Information Mapping - DNS Analysis, and click Zenmap.

3.   Notice that under the Profile menu that there are several options to determine what type of scan you would like to run, as shown in the following screenshot:

4.    The first step is creating a new profile. A profile in Zenmap allows a Penetration Tester to create what type of scan to execute and what different options to include.Navigate to the Profile menu and select New Profile as shown in the following screenshot:

5.   When you select New Profile, the profile editor will launch. You will need to give your profile a descriptive name. For example, you can call the profile testscan as I have named here.Optionally, you can give the profile a description. During your course of using Zenmap you will probably create many profiles and make multiple scans.

6.    Zenmap is the best way to get output from Nmap scans. Zenmap offers a rich graphical user interface that displays scans that can be exported into different formats, such as text or Microsoft Excel.

KALI LINUX : INSTALLATION SCREENSHOTS

Kali Linux is a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. It is maintained and funded by Offensive Security Ltd. It was developed by Mati Aharoni and Devon Kearns of Offensive Security through the rewrite of BackTrack, their previous forensics Linux distribution.Kali Linux is preinstalled with numerous penetration-testing programs, including nmap (a port scanner), Wireshark (a packet analyzer), John the Ripper (a password cracker), and Aircrack-ng (a software suite for penetration-testing wireless LANs). Kali Linux can be run from a hard disk, live CD, or live USB. It is a supported platform of the Metasploit Project's Metasploit Framework, a tool for developing and executing security exploits.This post brings you the screen step wise shots during installation....