Web Assessment Testing Configuration

My standard testing process takes some a little work upfront, but I’ve found it’s easy to work with after the initial setup and is the most efficient way for me to manage different projects.

First off, I typically funnel my traffic through a single egress point. Depending on the project, that might be a Kali box deployed at a client site, in a cloud instance, in my office lab, or even locally. Having multiple options available means I can be prepared for firewall restrictions or other networking requirements.

While I use the command line over SSH for most of my interactions with the attack box, I prefer to run any thick clients on my workstation with the network traffic still flowing through the attack box. For Kali programs, such as DirBuster, I leverage the X Window System (X11 / X) to tunnel the GUI over SSH to my local system. To do this, I simply connect to my kali box like this:

$ ssh brkr19@kali -XC

The -X parameter enables the X tunneling and the -C option compresses the data to hopefully speed it up a little. No matter what you do though, it’s still going to lag quite a bit.

I use Firefox for most of my web testing, but proxy everything through Burp so I have a record of it and can easily replay attacks or modify requests. Everything from Burp is then proxied over an SSH port-forwarded connection to a Kali box, which then makes the HTTP connection directly to the system I’m assessing.

The proxy connection is simple:

$ ssh brkr19@kali -D 8081 -fN

The -D 8081 parameter just sets what port will be listening on your localhost and the -fN parameters run the whole command in the background and then returns back to your command line.

Burp can then be configured to use this SOCKS proxy in the Project Options tab (be sure to use localhost for the host):

Finally, in order to get Firefox to use Burp as its proxy, I use the FoxyProxy plug-in and send traffic to localhost on port 8080 (the default listener in Burp).

All browsing through Firefox will now be captured in Burp, and appear to have originated from the Kali box!