Taipan is an automated web application scanner which allows identifying web vulnerabilities in an automatic way, the information security training professional explain. This project is the core engine of a broader project which includes other components, like a web dashboard where you can manage your scan or download a PDF report and a scanner agent to run on specific host.
Build Release Download
If you want to try the dev version of Taipan without to wait for an official release, you can download the build version. This version is built every time that a commit is done and the build process is not broken. You can download it from the Artifacts Directory.
Using Taipan
Taipan can run on both Windows (natively) and Linux (with mono). To run it in Linux you have to install mono in version >= 4.8.0. You can track the implementation of the new features in the related Kanban board.
Taipan allow to scan the given web site by specify different kind of profiles, the information security expert said. Each profile enable or disable a specific scan feature, to show all the available profile just run Taipan with the –show-profiles_ option.
During a scan you can interact with it by set the scan in Pause or Stop it if necessary. In order to do so you have to press:
P: pause the scan
S: stop the scan
R: resume a paused scan
The state change is not immediate and you have to wait until all threads have reached the decider state.
Launch a scan
To launch a new scan you have to provide the url and the profile which must be used. It is not necessary to specify the full profile name, a prefix is enough.
Taipan.exe -p Full -u https://127.0.0.1/
Taipan is currently developed with using VisualStudio 2017 Community Edition and uses paket as packet manager, the information security training expert said. To build the source code you have to:
- clone the repository
- run paket.exe install
- open the solution in VisualStudio and compile it
Taipan is composed of four main components:
- Web Application fingerprinter: it inspects the given application in order to identify if it is a COTS application. If so, it extracts the identified version.
- Hidden Resource Discovery: this component scans the application in order to identify resources that are not directly navigable or that shouldn’t be accessed, like secret pages or test pages.
- Crawler: This component navigates the web site in order to provide to the other components a list of pages to analyze. It allows mutating the request in order to find not so common paths.
- Vulnerability Scanner: this component probes the web application and tries to identify possible vulnerabilities. It is composed of various AddOn in order to easily expand its Knowledge Base.
https://asciinema.org/a/166362
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
