Web Fuzzing
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The term fuzzing refers to a testing technique that sends various types of user input to a certain interface to study how it would react. If we were fuzzing for SQL injection vulnerabilities, we would be sending random special characters and seeing how the server would react. If we were fuzzing for a buffer overflow, we would be sending long strings and incrementing their length to see if and when the binary would break.
We usually utilize pre-defined wordlists of commonly used terms for each type of test for web fuzzing to see if the webserver would accept them. This is done because web servers do not usually provide a directory of all available links and domains (unless terribly configured), and so we would have to check for various links and see which ones return pages. For example, if we visit , we would get an HTTP code 404 Page Not Found, and see the below page:
However, if we visit a page that exists, like /login, we would get the login page and get an HTTP code 200 OK, and see the below page:
This is the basic idea behind web fuzzing for pages and directories. Still, we cannot do this manually, as it will take forever. This is why we have tools that do this automatically, efficiently, and very quickly. Such tools send hundreds of requests every second, study the response HTTP code, and determine whether the page exists or not. Thus, we can quickly determine what pages exist and then manually examine them to see their content.
To determine which pages exist, we should have a wordlist containing commonly used words for web directories and pages, very similar to a Password Dictionary Attack, which we will discuss later in the module. Though this will not reveal all pages under a specific website, as some pages are randomly named or use unique names, in general, this returns the majority of pages, reaching up to 90% success rate on some websites.
Within our PwnBox, we can find the entire SecLists repo available under /opt/useful/SecLists. The specific wordlist we will be utilizing for pages and directory fuzzing is another commonly used wordlist called directory-list-2.3, and it is available in various forms and sizes. We can find the one we will be using under:
We will not have to reinvent the wheel by manually creating these wordlists, as great efforts have been made to search the web and determine the most commonly used words for each type of fuzzing. Some of the most commonly used wordlists can be found under the GitHub repository, which categorizes wordlists under various types of fuzzing, even including commonly used passwords, which we'll later utilize for Password Brute Forcing.
