I just had the time to play around with skipfish and WebGoat. Both projects are actually awesome. Not only because they try to solve an important problem and are free, but also because it is very easy to get started. It is really just a matter of downloading, unpacking and running.
“WebGoat is a deliberately insecure J2EE web application maintained by OWASP designed to teach web application security lessons” and tries to make it easy to teach and learn WebSec. It includes various lessons that the user has to take by solving a hackme. Of course, the usual suspects like XSS, SQLi or CSRF are covered. But they also ship AJAX, concurrency or HTTP problems.
As I read about skipfish over the last weeks, I was actually looking for a standard webapp that security assessment tools could run against so that the tools could be compared. I thought no such thing existed and was delighted to see WebGoat.
Installing and running WebGoat is very easy because it comes in a self contained bundle that works out of the box (for me at least 😉 ). As far as I can see, it also seems to work pretty well. However, there’s lots of room for improvement. They could equip the “Show Code” function with a source code highlighter, get rid of all the unnecessary JavaScript to make it work even if no JavaScript is turned on, double check their lessons whether they actually work (Hints in Prepared Statement SQLi are useless) or even dwell down on technical details during explanation of lessons. Or at least point to some good explanation. I know, these are ambitious goals, but eventually someone with a big pile of money comes around and badly needs to spend it 😉
“Skipfish is an active web application security reconnaissance tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes” and the further description sounds promising. So I gave it a try and again, it was as easy as downloading, unpacking, making and running.
I then ran it against the site to see how much it’ll get:
./skipfish -W dictionaries/complete.wl -A guest:guest -o /tmp/sf-results-simple-sqli-full 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/webgoat/attack?Screen=75&menu=1200'
It produces a self contained (read: 30MB) webpage which is actually nice to browse. The results, however, were not too exciting. It didn’t actually find any serious issue which I thought was interesting, given that WebGoat is deliberately insecure. I’ve uploaded the results and invite you to browse them 🙂
