AJAX spidering is a process of discovering requests on an AJAX-rich web app that cannot be found using a regular spidering tool. This can be done by accessing the AJAX spidering window via ZAP -> Tools -> AJAX Spider on ZAP’s menu bar.
What is Spider Spider in OWASP ZAP?
The OWASP ZAP Desktop User Guide Getting Started Features Spider Spider The spider is a tool that is used to automatically discover new resources (URLs) on a particular Site. It begins with a list of URLs to visit, called the
What is the Spider tool?
The spider is a tool that is used to automatically discover new resources (URLs) on a particular Site. It begins with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds, which depends on how the Spider is started.
How does the Spider work with hyperlinks?
The Spider can configured and started using the Spider dialogue. During the processing of an URL, the Spider makes a request to fetch the resource and then parses the response, identifying hyperlinks. It currently has the following behavior when processing types of responses:
What is the Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)?
Active spidering with OWASP Zed Attack Proxy The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an easy to use integrated penetration testing tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications. It is designed to be used by people with a wide range of security experience and as such is ideal for developers and functional testers who are new to penetration testing.
What is the difference between web spidering and active scan?
Spider: It is used to automatically discover new resources/URLs on your website. It visits those URLs, identifies the hyperlinks and adds them to the list. Active Scan: It is used to find the potential vulnerabilities by using the known attacks against the selected targets.
What is Ajax spidering?
The AJAX Spider is an add-on for a crawler called Crawljax. The add-on sets up a local proxy in ZAP to talk to Crawljax. The AJAX Spider allows you to crawl web applications written in AJAX in far more depth than the native Spider. Use the AJAX Spider if you may have web applications written in AJAX.
What is active and passive scan in ZAP?
Passive scanning does not change the requests and responses in any way, and is therefore safe to use. Active Scan: Attempts to find potential vulnerabilities by using known attacks against the selected targets. You must perform active scan only if you have permission to test the application.
What is threshold in ZAP?
Threshold. This controls how likely ZAP is to report potential vulnerabilities. If you select Off then the scanner won't run. If you select Low then more potential issues will be raised which may increase the number of false positives.
What is active scan in Zap?
Active scanning attempts to find potential vulnerabilities by using known attacks against the selected targets. Active scanning is an attack on those targets. You should NOT use it on web applications that you do not own.
Is zap a DAST tool?
OWASP's ZAP is a free, open-source DAST scanner widely used by security professionals around the world to find web application vulnerabilities.
What is the difference between passive and active scanning?
A client can use two scanning methods: active and passive. During an active scan, the client radio transmits a probe request and listens for a probe response from an AP. With a passive scan, the client radio listens on each channel for beacons sent periodically by an AP.
What is the difference between active and passive vulnerability scanners?
Active scanning tries to connect to every IP address on a network and determine open TCP/IP ports, application version information and device vulnerabilities. On the other hand, passive scanning uses one or more network taps to see which systems are actually communicating and which apps are actually running.
What is passive scanning?
Passive scanning is a method of vulnerability detection that relies on information gleaned from network data that is captured from a target computer without direct interaction.
What is passive scanning in ZAP?
ZAP by default passively scans all HTTP messages (requests and responses) sent to the web application being tested. Passive scanning does not change the requests nor the responses in any way and is therefore safe to use.
How do I use ZAP command line?
To use ZAP CLI, you need to set the port ZAP runs on (defaults to 8090) and the path to the folder in which ZAP is installed. These can be set either as commandline parameters or with the environment variables ZAP_PORT and ZAP_PATH .
What does Owasp zap test for?
What Is OWASP ZAP? Penetration testing helps in finding vulnerabilities before an attacker does. OSWAP ZAP is an open-source free tool and is used to perform penetration tests. The main goal of Zap is to allow easy penetration testing to find the vulnerabilities in web applications.
What is Ajax and why do we use it?
AJAX is a technique for creating fast and dynamic web pages. AJAX allows web pages to be updated asynchronously by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes. This means that it is possible to update parts of a web page, without reloading the whole page.
What is Zap tool?
OWASP ZAP is a dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications. Like all OWASP projects, it's completely free and open source—and we believe it's the world's most popular web application scanner.
What does spider do when crawling?
When crawling, the Spider has an internal mechanism that marks which pages were already visited, so they are not processed again. When this check is made, the way the URIs parameters are handled is set using this option. There are three available options:
What is a spider scope?
Allows to manage the domains, string literals or regular expressions, that are in the spider's scope. The normal behavior of the spider is to only follow links to resources found on the same domain as the page where the scan started. However, this option allows you to define additional domains that are considered “in scope” during the crawling process. Pages on these domains are processed during the scan.
How is spider depth calculated?
The depth is calculated starting from the seeds, so, if a Spider scan starts with only a single URL (eg. URL manually specified), the depth is calculated from this one. However, if the scan starts with multiple seeds (eg. recurse and Sites tree node with children), a resource is processed if it's depth relative to any of the seeds is less than the defined one.
What does the parameter zero mean in spider?
The parameter defines the maximum depth in the crawling process where a page must be found in order for it to be processed. Resources found deeper than this level are not fetched and parsed by the spider. The value zero means unlimited depth.
What is the maximum length of time a spider can run?
The maximum length of time that the spider should run for, measured in minutes. Zero (the default) means that the spider will run until it has found all of the links that it is able to.
Is a spider multi thread?
The spider is multi-threaded and this is the number that defines the maximum number of worker threads used in the crawling process. Changing this parameter does not have any effect on any crawling is in progress.
Does spidering accept cookies?
If the spider scans should accept cookies while spidering. If enabled the Spider will properly handle any cookies received from the server and will send them back accordingly. If the option is disabled, the Spider will not send any cookies in its requests. For example, this might control whether or not the Spider uses the same session throughout a spidering scan.#N#When accepting cookies the cookies are not shared between spider scans, each scan has its own cookie jar.#N#This option has low priority, the Spider will respect other (global) options related to the HTTP state. This option is ignored if, for example, the option Enable (Global) HTTP State is enabled, when spidering as a User or when a HTTP Session is active.
What are vulnerability scanners?
Vulnerability scanners are tools that automate the process of detecting security vulnerabilities. They include static scanners - SAST, dynamic scanners - DAST, and interactive scanners - IAST.
What is OWASP ZAP?
ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is a free, open source, and multifunctional tool for testing web application security. It features simplicity in installation and operation, making it one of the better choices for those new to this type of software. OWASP ZAP is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
Key features of the ZAP scanner
ZAP is a 'man-in-the-middle proxy'. This means that it runs behind the browser, but before the audited application. All information exchanged between the browser and the application therefore first passes through ZAP.
Deeper analysis - sources of knowledge about OWASP ZAP
If you want to learn all about using ZAP, I’ve prepared a list of resources that will help you understand and master every aspect of the tool and allow you to enter the vast community gathered around it.
OWASP ZAP tool – summary
Application security testing, supported by tools that automate this process, is the way to detect the largest number of errors on the audited website. Some steps are too time-consuming to be performed manually. The pentesting community has created free tools that save time. It’s worth using them.
Beccy Stafford
Apologies for the probably basic question, I've spent a lot of time googling and not been able to find an answer to my question.
Simon Bennetts
Passive scanning is always performed because it is completely safe - ZAP just looks at the requests and responses rather than making any additional requests.
Beccy Stafford
Just to double check then, would an active scan find the same issues as a passive scan, with extra on top?
Sivabalan Ravichandran
No. There is no change [in spider setting/ target application/ user role] at all. But I do not understand, how following runs can crawl more urls.
Simon Bennetts
Can you give us some sanitized examples of site nodes (URLs plus params) that were not found on the first run but were found on subsequent runs?
Sivabalan Ravichandran
No. I have not and also couldn't find the exact urls that are newly found in second scan. But while scanning http://demo.testfire.net application, 97 urls were found in first scan and 105 were found in second time.
Sivabalan Ravichandran
The scans were started via site tree [after intercepting via browser]. Also, I have set the context to demo.testfire and unable to export the urls that are out of context. Kindly find attached urls list obtained from two scans [with context].
How does ZAP work?
By selecting “Active Scan site” in the “Attack” menu, ZAP will send hundreds of requests to the selected website. As the website sends back responses, ZAP will analyze them for signs of vulnerabilities. This is an important aspect of web scanning to understand: the scanner is not trying to exploit the website, but rather send hundreds of proof-of-concept malicious requests to the website and then analyze these responses for signs of vulnerability. Once an exact page is identified to be plagued by an exact vulnerability (SQL injection on a login page, for example), you can then use the intercepting proxy to craft a malicious request to that exact page with the exact malicious variable values in order to complete the hack!
What happens when you open a ZAP?
When you open ZAP the first time, a license dialog box appears that you must first accept. Then a SSL certificate warning dialog box greets you. In order for ZAP to function properly over HTTPS, it needs to have an onboard SSL certification.
What is a zed attack proxy?
The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) tool available at https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Zed_Attack_Proxy_Project is an open source web application scanner provided through the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). This tool is an automated framework for performing a number of tests against web applications and identifying potential vulnerabilities. In addition to the automated tools, OWASP ZAP provides the ability to craft and submit manual tests against the target web application so that the penetration tester can fine-tune their tests.
What is a ZAP scanner?
ZAP provides automated scanners as well as a set of tools that allow you to find security vulnerabilities manually.
Why is it called a zap?
The ZAP is so called because it proxies your connections out to your target of choice. This gives ZAP the ability to intercept and tamper with any outbound request or inbound response. After launching ZAP, you configure your browser to point at it by configuring localhost and port 8080 in your proxy settings.
Why is acceptance of ZAP certificate required?
If the interest is in intercepting requests destined for a HTTPS site, acceptance of the ZAP certificate is required so that the traffic can be decrypted and re-encrypted.
Where are scan results stored in ZAP?
All the scanning results will be housed in the “Alerts” tab for easy review. The full report of ZAP Scanner’s findings can be exported as HTML or Extensible Markup Language via the “Reports” menu.
