In search of golden fleece

Key activity when looking for reflected XSS is to check what parameters provided in request are echoed back in response. Doing that manually is tedious and that time can be spent in more productive way. For example you can write burp extension that will do it for you. So, I present Argonaut.

Extension works in very simple way - it parses captured request to extract all parameters (cookies included) and later search through response body to see if value in question has been echoed back. In such case a short snippet of match is presented to the user.

Currently a parameter parsing is done in quite a dumb way - it works quite well with standard GET and POST parameters, but for example is unable to extract param values from JSON or XML and tried to see for exact match of whole payload. That is not very effective, but it is on my TODO list. One more thing to remember - parameter values shorter then 3 characters are ignored (you don't want 300 matches of '1' in result table).

Hey, but what about escaping, you ask? No worries, I got this covered. Let's say you are testing a web application written on top of Django. Most likely you are going to use Jinja2 template engine, and it applies escaping. Argonaut will search the response body for plain parameter value (let's say test">), but will also apply various defined transformations/escaping to see if for example application returned 'test">'.

I've chosen Jinja2 example for a reason - truth be told Jinja2 is the only transformation implemented so far, but mechanism is in place and I'm planning to add new ones very soon.

There is still work to be done. Some simple tasks will be completed soon - for example new transformations and some UI work. Others, harder - like support for contextual autoescaping libraries and type dependent parameter extraction will have to wait a bit. Anyway, stay tuned and let me know what do you think.