OWTF aims to make pen testing:
- Aligned with OWASP Testing Guide + PTES + NIST
- More efficient
- More comprehensive
- More creative and fun (minimise un-creative work)
so that pentesters will have more time to
- See the big picture and think out of the box
- More efficiently find, verify and combine vulnerabilities
- Have time to investigate complex vulnerabilities like business logic/architectural flaws or virtual hosting sessions
- Perform more tactical/targeted fuzzing on seemingly risky areas
- Demonstrate true impact despite the short timeframes we are typically given to test.
The tool is highly configurable and anybody can trivially create simple plugins or add new tests in the configuration files without having any development experience.
Please share your plugins/tests with the community! :)
Note: This tool is however not a silverbullet and will only be as good as the person using it: Understanding and experience will be required to correctly interpret tool output and decide what to investigate further in order to demonstrate impact.
OWTF uses "Scumbag spidering", ie. instead of implementing yet another spider (a hard job), OWTF will scrub the output of all tools/plugins run to gather as many URLs as possible.
This is somewhat "cheating" but tremendously effective since it combines the results of different tools, including several tools that perform brute forcing of files and directories.
If one tool crashes OWTF, will move on to the next tool/test, saving the partial output of the tool until it crashed. OWTF also allow you to monitor worker processes and estimated plugin runtimes.
If your internet connectivity or the target host goes down during an assessment, you can pause the relevant worker processes and resume them later avoiding losing data to little as possible.
OWTF separates its traffic to the target into mainly 3 types of plugins:
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Passive : No traffic goes to the target
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Semi Passive : Normal traffic to target
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Active: Direct vulnerability probing
Some features like the passive and semi_passive test separation may also assist pen testers wishing to go the extra mile to get a head start and maybe even legitimately start report writing or preparing attacks before they are given the green light to test.
OWTF uses PostgreSQL as the database backend. All core OWTF functions and options are exposed through APIs making it easy to add new features with little overhead.
OWTF will try to classify the findings as closely as possible to the OWASP Testing Guide. It also supports the NIST and the PTES standards.
PlugnHack v2 support : PlugnHack is a proposed standard from the Mozilla security team for defining how security tools can interact with browsers in a more useful and usable way.
Zest and OWASP-ZAP integration : Zest is an experimental specialized scripting language (domain-specific ) developed by the Mozilla security team and is intended to be used in web oriented security tools.
OWTF now has a default web interface which integrates all core OWTF options and makes it possible to manage large pentests easily.
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The web interface is built on Twitter Bootstrap, making it very easy to use and customize.
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The default configuration can be changed easily from the browser.
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Makes it easy to control worker processes and see the estimated run times for each plugin run.
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Manage a large number of target URLs easily
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Searchable transactions and URL logs.
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As soon as each plugin finishes or sometimes before (i.e. after each vulnerability scanner finishes), the report is updated asynchronously through the OWTF APIs.
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Automated plugin rankings from the tool output, fully configurable by the user.
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Configurable risk rankings
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In-line notes editor for each plugin.
Currently, OWTF is developed and is supported on Linux, with out-of-box support for the Kali Linux and Samurai-WTF.
OWTF has been developed for Python 2.7, and therefore it may not run as intended on older Python versions.
For more information on third-party library requirements, please refer to the requirements.
Recommended:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owtf/bootstrap-script/master/bootstrap.sh; chmod +x bootstrap.sh; ./bootstrap.sh
or simply clone the latest version of OWTF.
Check out the wiki for more information.