Wikimedia Security Team/ApplicationScanning

Overview & Goals
The Wikimedia Foundation Security Team seeks to complement its manual security testing processes with automated security scanning. The team will evaluate several tools to determine their feasibility for use within the organization.

Overall Tasks

 * Define selection criteria
 * Test and compare features and performance of tools in trial installations
 * Select and deploy tool in labs
 * Configure weekly automated scanning of beta from from labs (coordinated with RelEng)
 * Record baseline scan results for core and one extension

Active Scanning Areas/Checks

 * accuracy of this table is questionable; no source code inspection was done

DVWA, Authenticated
Arachni could not authenticate to execute the scan. Reconfiguration and re-invocation are pending.

MediaWiki, Authenticated
Using default settings, none of the scanners completed a scan of MediaWiki in a timely manner. Rule and scope tuning and re-invocation is in progress.

General Observations and Questions
The tools have varying levels of support for automated scanning. It’s less important that any of the tools be able to run headless, and more important that they simply be invokable via some non-GUI mechanism (REST API, command line, etc.). Burp, unfortunately, seems to be least featureful in this respect.

All of the tools have a concept of a scan profile, which exists separately from a scan invocation. Arachni requires that all scan specific variables (form field values, authentication credentials, etc.) be stored in a profile. This means that adjusting any of those parameters requires duplication and modification of an existing profile. Burp and Zap allow some level of parameterization of profiles, storing parameter values with the scan data itself.

Some configurability is offered via the API’s for both Burp and ZAP, however our most flexible route to scan configuration requires use of the desktop tools to create empty sessions, then upload of those sessions to tool instances running on our scan servers.

What do we scan?
It won’t be feasible to allow the chosen scanner to spider all accessible links at http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page, for example. Just spidering would not complete in a timely manner, and scanning itself would take a huge amount of time. Should we scan all Special: pages, plus a manually selected subset of entry pages?

Arachni
Arachni sort of requires the least work in order to be run in an headless manner. It is semi-headless out of the box, by nature of its architecture.

Arachni has a built-in finding review system, which allows for discussion of issues, flagging as valid or false-positive, etc.

Internal server errors were observed during relatively normal operations, such as editing the textual description of a scan after it has completed. While scans are run, server-side errors are output to a textarea in the middle of the page, with an message that these errors may need to be reported to developers. This hinders viewing of scan results which are populated via XMLHttpRequest-based polling in a pane below the error message textarea. Viewing of the errors themselves are also hindered by refreshing of the textarea every second or so, causing focus to be placed at the bottom of the textarea content. Additionally, the fact that these errors appeared during a basic, unauthenticated scan of WebGoat is concerning.

Something about the operation of Arachni in a local VM spikes the CPU. More investigation is needed. I believe it is the frequency of polling and in-browser activity, but I’m not certain about this. If it is in-browser activity, it’s not a huge obstruction for headless operation, but may be of concern at results inspection/review time.

At some point my Arachni VM hung. I hard reset the machine, logged in, restarted Arachni, and found that all scan results were gone. It was as if the database (SQLite in this instance) had been corrupted beyond repair, and silently rebuilt. More investigation is needed (and we’d be running on PostgreSQL in production anyway, so it’s maybe not a huge problem).

Arachni cannot select from a group of usernames and passwords for authenticating during scanning.

Burp
Burp appears to require to most work to run headless. This is not supported at all by the vendor, but community efforts have been made to support automated scanning using Burp.

Burp seems to have the best scanner of the bunch. A default scan of DVWA found command injection, stored XSS, reflected XSS. Burp also seems to