It’s been a while since we last mentioned Skipfish, it was back in March 2010 when they first came out.
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. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments.
A number of commercial and open source tools with analogous functionality is readily available (e.g., Nikto, Websecurify, Netsparker, w3af, Arachni); stick to the one that suits you best. That said, skipfish tries to address some of the common problems associated with web security scanners.
Specific advantages include:
- High speed: pure C code, highly optimized HTTP handling, minimal CPU footprint – easily achieving 2000 requests per second with responsive targets.
- Ease of use: heuristics to support a variety of quirky web frameworks and mixed-technology sites, with automatic learning capabilities, on-the-fly wordlist creation, and form autocompletion.
- Cutting-edge security logic: high quality, low false positive, differential security checks, capable of spotting a range of subtle flaws, including blind injection vectors.
Some users had a problem getting it running, it does have a dependency – assuming you are on a Debian based distro, all you need to do is:
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apt-get install libidn11 |
The minum syntax required to run the tool would be:
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./skipfish -o /home/youruser -W dictionaries/standard.wl http://yoursite.com |
That should be enough to get you started!
It’s a pretty powerful tool and likely to pick up issues that Nessus or Nikto might miss.
You can download Skipfish 1.94b here:
Or read more here.