Tag Archives: Selenium

Tenable IO WAS Chrome Extension

In the comments of the previous post about Tenable IO WAS Fergus Cooney mentioned a new Google Chrome extension for Tenable IO WAS, that should help in configuring scan Authentication setting. You can install it in Chrome Web Store.

Tenable IO WAS Chrome App

The idea is great. Authentication process in modern web applications is actually too complicated for Web Application Scanners. It is almost impossible to determine automatically which elements of the web interface should be clicked and where to enter the login and password. So it’s great that we can help scanner to do this with the Selenium script. And if Selenium IDE is somehow integrated into the scanner, it is even better. With Tenable.io Web Application Scanning Chrome extension you simply perform the authentication procedure in Chrome once manually, and the recorded script will be sent to Tenable IO WAS.

However, the actual implementation of this extension, IMHO, could be better.

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First look at Tenable.io Web Application Scanner (WAS)

When Tenable firstly announced Web Application Security scanner as a part of their new Tenable.io platform, it was quite intriguing. Certainly, they already had some WAS functionality before in Nessus. For example, path traversal check was pretty good. But this functionality was quite fragmental and barely manageable. How Tenable now write in their docs: “Nessus is incompatible with modern web applications that rely on Javascript and are built on HTML5”.

First look at Tenable.io Web Application Scanner (WAS)

That’s why Nessus couldn’t be called fully functioning Web Application Scanning solution. However, Tenable.io WAS is a completely new story. The full description is available on official site. Here I will make a very fast review and give some comments.

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New Nessus 7 Professional and the end of cost-effective Vulnerability Management (as we knew it)

It’s an epic and really sad news. 🙁

Nessus 7 release

When people asked me about the cost-effective solution for Vulnerability Management I usually answered: “Nessus Professional with some additional automation through Nessus API”.

With just a couple of Nessus Professional scanning nodes it was possible to scan all the infrastructure and network perimeter (see “Vulnerability Management for Network Perimeter“). Price for each node was fixed and reasonable. And you could make your any reports from the raw scan data, as you like it.

Nessus Pro was still were best choice even when Tenable:

  • Cut off master/slave functionality in Nessus and created “Nessus Manager”.
  • Changed API completely during the update from 5 to 6 version.
  • Gradually increased the price from $1,5k to $2,7k per scanning node per year.

But unfortunately it’s not anymore. End of an era.

And what is even more sad is that Tenable does not mention disabling the API and multi-user function in the main Nessus 7 marketing, as it never was, as if it’s not very important. Just look at “Announcing Nessus Professional v7” – not a word  about “API” or users. Only in additional link:

get more information Nessus7

Only there, in the text (not a video) there is an information about removed features.

The nice little things like “Easily transferable license” and “Emailed scan reports and custom report name / logo” do not make it any better.

So, what next?

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Automating Opera browser with Selenium WebDriver and Python

The right way to automate a web application is, certainly, to understand how this application works, by using burp (see “Burp Suite Free Edition and NTLM authentication in ASP.net applications“) for example, retrieve all necessary requests and learn how to use them.

However, this is sometimes so difficult and confusing, especially when the site owners are actively fighting with automation attempts. In this case, you may want to automate somehow the work on the highest level, with the graphical elements of the site. You can view them as some pictures, as SikuliX does (“SikuliX: the last chance for automation“, or as some elements of code, as Selenium IDE does.

But it would much better to control the browser itself from the Python scripts. And this can be done with Selenium WebDriver.

Selenium WebDriver, Python and Opera browser

Guys from Guru99 have wrote me a letter about their free course about Selenium.

This course looks pretty good. In the first part you can find a detailed description of Selenium components and the project history. After reading this, I finally decided that the Selenium WebDriver suited me best. Examples of WebDriver usage are written in Java, and I wanted to use Python. But since the calls are the same, lessons of this course are still more than useful.

And despite the fact that Selenium is usually used with Firefox, I tried to use it with Chromium-based Opera. This browser is very popular in Russia because of some unique features. 😉

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Selenium, SikuliX and Social Network posting

The last post was about SikuliX. It’s fair to say that it’s not optimal for web applications automation. For such applications, it’s better to use something, that will natively work with your web-browse. The first solution that comes to mind is, of course, Selenium.

Selenium is a portable software-testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without the need to learn a test scripting language.

This app is released under the Apache 2.0 license and is a very common tool for Quality Assurance (QA). It can be also used in Information Security. For example, you can upload Selenium scripts in Qualys WAS (Web Application Scanner)  to help scanner in performing some complex operations, for example in authentication on the website.

Selenium Upload script in Qualys

Selenium is available in a form of two products: Selenium WebDriver for some hardcore automation and web-browser plugin Selenium IDE, which will help you to create and run scripts. I chose Selenium IDE.

Selenium types
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