The purpose of this tool is to automate the manual, uncreative part of pen testing: For example, spending time trying to remember how to call "tool X", parsing results of "tool X" manually to feed "tool Y", etc.
By reducing this burden I hope pen testers will have more time to:
- See the big picture and think out of the box
- More efficiently find, verify and combine vulnerabilities
- Have time to investigate complex vulnerabilities like business logic/architectural flaws or virtual hosting sessions
- Perform more tactical/targeted fuzzing on seemingly risky areas
- Demonstrate true impact despite the short timeframes we are typically given to test.
Some features like the passive and semi_passive test separation may also assist pen testers wishing to go the extra mile to get a head start and maybe even legitimately start report writing or preparing attacks before they are given the green light to test.
The tool is highly configurable and anybody can trivially create simple plugins or add new tests in the configuration files without having any development experience. Please share your tests with the community! :)
This tool is however not a silverbullet and will only be as good as the person using it: Understanding and experience will be required to correctly interpret tool output and decide what to investigate further in order to demonstrate impact.
- OWASP Testing Guide-oriented: owtf will try to classify the findings as closely as possible to the OWASP Testing Guide
- Report updated on the fly: As soon as each plugin finishes or sometimes before (i.e. after each vulnerability scanner finishes)
- "Scumbag spidering": Instead of implementing yet another spider (a hard job), owtf will scrub the output of all tools/plugins run to gather as many URLs as possible. This is somewhat "cheating" but tremendously effective since it combines the results of different tools, including several tools that perform brute forcing of files and directories.
- Resilience: If one tool crashes owtf will move on to the next tool/test, saving the partial output of the tool until it crashed
- Easy to configure: config files are easy to read and modify
- Easy to run: No strange parameters, DB setup requirements, libraries, complex dependencies, etc
- Full control of what tests to run, interactivity and hopefully easy to follow examples and help :)
- Easy to review transaction logs and plain text files with URLs, simple for scripting
- Basic Google Hacking without (annoying) API Key requirements via "blanket searches", trying a bunch of operators at once, you can then narrow the search down if you find something interesting.
- Easy to extract data from the database to parse or pass to other tools: They are all text files
- Linux (any Ubuntu derivative should work just fine) and python 2.6.5 or greater
- Latest Kali version not required but helpful (almost 0 setup time)
- You do NOT have to have all tools installed: owtf will move on with an error for the missing tools
- Clone owtf repo using git => git clone https://github.com/owtf/owtf
- You may also want to run install/install.py
- Check out Wiki for more help
Q - What are the OWASP Codes "OWASP-WU-..." A - Those are just fake OWASP Codes to uniquely identify owtf plugins that do not correspond to any OWASP test. For example: OWASP-WU-SPID - Only visits gathered links to feed other plugins OWASP-WU-VULN - This runs all configured vulnerability scanners, the findings will correspond to different OWASP Codes but they must be run from 1 plugin only performing all tests for efficiency and simplicity