skipfish – fast, easy and simple

Posted in technology, testing by pedro | Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 8:30 pm

Skipfish is google code project. It is web application security scanner, high speed (they claim 2000 requests per second* – * – at local LAN :) ) and due the fact it is command line tool without fancy wizards, options and so on, it is relatively easy to use, and for sure it is easy to just start scanning.

Skipfish is active scanner so it first scan application, preparing the map of web site, than recursively ran different test, the last thing is report generation. Documentation is simple and has a lot of example we can start on. So let’s see that in action.

One of such command is:

$ skipfish -m 5 -LVJ -W /dev/null -o output_dir -b ie http://www.example.com/

During the scan, Skipfish is displaying statistics:

Scan statistics
---------------

       Scan time : 0:11:07.0068
   HTTP requests : 2446 sent (3.71/s), 16228.73 kB in, 659.18 kB out (25.32 kB/s)
     Compression : 0.00 kB in, 0.00 kB out (0.00% gain)
 HTTP exceptions : 34 net errors, 0 proto errors, 0 retried, 0 drops
 TCP connections : 2451 total (1.09 req/conn)
  TCP exceptions : 0 failures, 1 timeouts, 0 purged
  External links : 745 skipped
    Reqs pending : 219        

Database statistics
-------------------

          Pivots : 471 total, 94 done (19.96%)
     In progress : 323 pending, 38 init, 12 attacks, 4 dict
   Missing nodes : 54 spotted
      Node types : 1 serv, 269 dir, 46 file, 1 pinfo, 91 unkn, 63 par, 0 val
    Issues found : 70 info, 111 warn, 49 low, 1 medium, 13 high impact
       Dict size : 0 words (0 new), 0 extensions, 0 candidates

After few hours/minutes, it depends on the site we are scanning, we will got

[+] Copying static resources...
[+] Sorting and annotating crawl nodes: 1666
[+] Looking for duplicate entries: 1666
[+] Counting unique issues: 1158
[+] Writing scan description...
[+] Counting unique issues: 1666
[+] Generating summary views...
[+] Report saved to outputDir/index.html
[+] This was a great day for science!

The report consist of “crawl results”, “document type overview” and “issue type overview”. My last scan result has some finding, but also has a lot of false positives, it seams that a lot of work still waiting for a Skipfish team, but it looks promising.

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about me

My name is Sebastian Pietrowski. I've finished Warsaw University as Master degree. I started my journey with Java 1.1 with Thread and JDBC programing in 1998 as I worked for merlin.pl. In 1999 I've passed Java Programer Certificate for Java 1.2, and was solution architect of merlin.pl infrastructure when we was moving from pl/sql to J2EE. It was great performance optimization with 10 times more req/sec than in requirements and 85 times faster as original solution.

Currently I work as Expert Software Development Java at F.Hoffmann-La Roche. The company was founded in 1896 and today, Roche employs over 80.000 people. After work I'm involved in activities related to Scala/Lift, Ruby/Rails/Merb, Python/Django. This is because I try to be pragmatic also I'm focused on application performance and tuning with success in my daily work.

My Yoda's motto: Do, or do not. There is no try.