It is the revolution of web browsers; they rule internet now. Browsers have evolved so much from what we had seen during the days of IE6. Now Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE are on war to prove who is the best. They try different ways to win the heart of users; Firefox took a great leap by introducing the ‘panaroma’ feature – focus on multitasking, chrome gets appreciation for its fluid design – focus on simplicity & ease of use, Opera and IE has browser stability on priority – focus on robustness.

During this evolution, some browsers tries to standout from others by introducing a new feature which had never been available in any of their counterparts. But the other browsers instead wait for the users comments on the new feature implemented, if appreciated, they implement the same feature in theirs, may be in a better way. The browser who introduced that feature first might even loose its credit in due course. User is forced to switch from their  favorite browser for a ‘single feature’ they found useful in the ‘other’ browser. Once they completely switch and get used to the new browser, the old one brings out the same feature plus few bonus features. This cycle never ends. Firefox introduced tabs and extensions when IE did not have in them, people were attracted to it and finally switched to firefox. Then the light weight chrome came with Tab tearing, web apps, new tab page with speed dial and many other features, made few users to make chrome as their default browser. Firefox then inherited few of chromes’ features, syncing and expose like tab candy/panaroma effects. We don’t have to switch browsers just for UI features, and if at all we do, it should be seamless.

This article tries to identify best features in each of the browser and the features we expect to be part any modern browser. Here, we try to baseline few ideas, those ideas which takes browser design to the next level.

Browser Main Screen (Mockup)

MOCKUP - Main Screen - Click over image to zoom

Highlights

Main Screen

1. Menu Button

Drop down to access frequently access browser actions like preferences, print options, edit etc. To replace standard browser tool bar. (Inspired from firefox/opera)

2. Extension Button

Displays drop down that contains icons of the extensions to activate/deactivate them, or displays extensions options in sub-menus. Does not consume your address bar space as used to in firefox or previous chrome version. (Inspired from Chromium resizable bar that displays extension icons)

3. Bookmarks Button

Displays organized bookmarks in dropdown, no more bookmarks bar – (Can be created in firefox by customize options for toolbar)

4. Only Favicons in tab title

We just need favicons to know which tab is what. Most of the websites have favicon now-a-days (Inspired from faviconize tab firefox extension/pin tabs/app tabs)

5. Tabs that behaves like Dock/Taskbar icons in OSX/Win7

MOCKUP - Switch pages from same site with hover preview

One favicon displayed for one domain/website. Its like transformation from Win XP quicklauch to Win7 Taskbar. 2 pages from Facebook are to be indicated by one tab and should allow user to switch over the pages from that single Facebook icon displayed. For example, hovering over the icon should display preview of different pages open from that same site. So this keeps the number of tabs open in the browser under control. (Inspired from OSX dock/Win7 Peek).

6. Tab Sets/Groups

Tabs should be grouped to different sets and only those tabs belonging to that set should be visible on the browser window. This gives us distraction free environment. We should be able to move the tabs across the tabset by drag-n-drop (Inspired by Opera Tab Sets/Firefox Panorama)

Example -

• SOCIAL Set – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc
• WORK Set – Stackoverflow, Superuser, Dev Forums etc
• FUN Set – Youtube, Failblog etc

7. DropZone for Downloads

We don’t need a separate downloads window to keep track of our downloads.  All we need is a small icon which displays the status of our downloads and should reveal the items downloaded only when required. So idea is to click on that dropzone icon to pop up a stack which displays the downloaded items/in progress ones. Another feature we would want is to be able to drag and drop the target URLs directly to the dropzone to start the download to the default downloads folder. (Inspired from Download statusbar firefox extensions/ flashget)

Check the Mockup

8. Semi Transparent Status Bar to display full URL (Autohides)

Status bar displays only when we hover over any link (Inspired from Chrome)

9. Unload the tabs on demand/Not all tabs are loaded during browser start

Some of the websites sends Ajax request continually load the time based dynamic content every n seconds even if the page is not active. For examples gmail syncs with the server to check for new email and there might be different apps that does the same. But we might not want gmail to do so and we dont want to close the tab either. So the solution is to unload the tab and activate/load it only when required. This happens during browser start as well, we load only the last tab this significantly increase browser startup time. (Inspired from Bartab Firefox addon)

10. Mouse Gesture Support

Less keystrokes – More usable browsers will be. Built-in support for mouse gestures. (Inspired by FireGestures Firefox addon and Chrome Gestures addon in Chrome)

11. Sync ‘Everything’

Every time you do a fresh install of your favorite browser anywhere, you have to spend hours to customize it. Do it at home and you repeat all again at work, or on your new laptop. All browsers should have built-in capabilities to sync preferences, extensions, bookmarks, and everything to ensure that user doesn’t even notice any change if browses at home or at work. He should be given options to create profile and sync those at work or home. (Inspired from Firefox weave, built-in with Firefox 4 though)

New Tab/ Hidden Address Bar

MOCKUP - New Tab Popup

1. Pops-up on demand

Address bar consumes unnecessary space of our precious screen real estate. We need address bar only when we access a new page so why should it be visible all the time? Clicking on the newtab icon displays a popup that has a tiny address bar. This is like a omnibar/awesomebar which means single box to accept URL as well as search string. (Inspired from AppPanel enabled using startup switch in Chrome).

2. Search Site

Below the address bar are the favicons of the currently open tabs. Example, select the icon of twitter then enter the search term to search twitter for something. Reduces many steps this way.

3. Top Sites (Starred)

Few starred sites/frequently used sites (may be top 10) are displayed in drop down when the Star icon is clicked. So open these sites with a click (Most visited in Chrome, Top Sites in Safari)

Tab Grid

A new perspective to our usual browsing experience. This displays preview of currently opened tabs in a grid, tabs can be easily identified/switched to from here. We should be able to close the tabs with a click without switching back to the page.

MOCKUP - Tab Grid

1. New Tab from Grid

This is the best part, we can create tabs by just entering the address of the page you want to access from the grid itself. Example – create tabs for Google reader/ Gmail or any site instantaneously and let it load when you are still in the grid. So in future grid enables user to quickly create and open multiple tabs. (Inspired from IE in Win7 mobile)

2. Switch Tabsets from Grid

Click on the tabset button to preview the tabs belonging to that set. Easily drag and drop the tabs to different sets from the Grid as well. (Inspired from Firefox Panorama/OSX Expose)

• Counter on Panorama feature – This feature in Firefox will become little complex and unmanageable after opening maybe 30 tabs (or on laptop screens). We will end up in have 10 or 15 tab piles. But the method mentioned in this article lets users to manage tabs on that tab set and does not display all the tabs in all the sets.

3. Open New Page of Opened Tab

List of opened tabs displayed in the Grid, click on it to clone the site to a different page.

Conclusion

Like the term ‘Tabs’ which is now a standard in all the browser, we expect the ideas mentioned in the post to be integral part of every browser. Let the users have seamless browser switch if the opt for. So in future, users should consider the parameters like speed, stability, performance to let them decide on the chosen and not just the UI based influences.

Mockups Below For Reference

Main Screen - Click over image to zoom

Hover Preview

New Tab Popup

Tab Grid

Please mention in comments if there are any features you would want to see in all the browsers or you deny on any of the idea mentioned.

Author of this post is familiar with different web browsers like IE 4 – 8, Now Defunct Netscape Navigator, Firefox (all versions), Opera, Chrome (all versions), Safari and many others. Has been evangelizing web browsers since 90s.

This post lists 13 Chrome Extensions to aid security testers during their web application pen testing.

1. WebDeveloper

2. Firebug Lite

3. Pendule

4. Chrome Web Developer Tools

5. Simple REST Client

6. View Selection Source

7. Domain Details

8. Chrome Sniffer

9. User-Agent Switcher

10. Unencrypted Password Warning

11. JSONView

12. Cookie Editor

View and Edit the Cookies created by the site visible in the active page

13. Light Shot

14. Note Anywhere (Bonus)

There are various harddisk space analyzers which gives us a graphical representation of the files/folders which eats up our harddisk. These tools even provide options to visually navigate through the folders to view the space occupied by its subfolders. Here, we talk about few popular disk analyzers which are portable and worth giving a shot.

Comparison of all those are presented in a table at the end of this post.

Security Perspective: If you are an info sec guy, esp. in forensics, you can utilize the features of the these tools to identify the presence of hidden large files/archives which might possibly contain some sensitive data in it. Most of the time secret truecrypt files are hidden inside some OS folders to make it look genuine.

Note: Most of the apps mentioned here can be downloaded in a portable format. The others can be made portable using the method mentioned here

Comparison Table – here.

HDGraph

SpaceSniffer

DiskSpaceFan

WinDirStat

TreeSizeFree

SpaceMonger

OverDisk

JDiskReport

Disktective

Xinorbis

Scanner

FilePro

FolderSize

Comparison Table

[Go To Top]

Backtrack is the most popularly used security distro used while during pentests. While we can partition our harddisk, install this OS and dual boot with our default OS; things can be made simpler by running BackTrack VM within our default OS. Using a security distro in a VM gives us few advantages like, portability & ability to quickly restore/duplicate the instances as required.

Running Backtrack

BackTrack4 VM can be downloaded from the backtrack site (link at the end of the post) and to run the VM, we need the free VMWare Player.

Install the VMWare Player and open the BT VM with it. We are good to go with the default configuration unless we have more RAM to spare (Its recommended to provide 512MB of RAM if you have around 2GB).

Adjust Backtrack VM RAM

Default Credentials

Backtrack VM comes with the default login credentials (which can be changed later, ofcourse)

bt login:  root
Password:  toor
. . .
root@bt:~#  startx

We should be able to see the BackTrack OS up and running by this time. If you face any difficulties with the screen resolution, install/upgrade your VMWare tools.

BackTrack VM Up and Running

Change Default Credentials

Once the OS is loaded, access the terminal from the taskbar and use the ‘passwd’ command to change the password.

bt~#  passwd
bt~#  New Password : ******
bt~#  Re-enter Password: ******

Enable Networking to Access Internet

Many a times internet might not work at the first shot. If it doesn’t do as mentioned below.

1. First find out the IP address/Default Gateway of you the HOST PC (Assuming that it’s an Windows OS, do ‘ipconfig’ in DOS Terminal)
2. Choose any arbitrary IP address, should be in the range of the IP of the host, and ensure that its not used.
3. In the BackTrack Terminal, type the following commands

bt~#  ifconfig eth0 up
bt~#  /etc/init.d/networking start

Once you have BackTrack running and Internet enabled, you are all set to use the tools bundled with this OS.

Backtrack VM Download Info
App Name	Backtrack VM Download
License	free
Type	OS
App URL
More Info	link

VMWare Player Download (Free):

This post details about the steps to add Syntax Highlighting Feature to any SharePoint site where you have access to upload files to server. This can help people who embed code snippets in the SharePoint site and share it with their team.

Download and extract SyntaxHighlighter scripts to your PC (Check the download link at the bottom of the post). Now access the SharePoint site and create a folder structure as shown in the below screenshot (i.e. to create ‘scripts’, ‘src’ and ‘styles’ folders inside syntax folder which is present in ‘Shared Documents’). Now upload the syntax highlighter files to appropriate folders.

Upload Scripts Folder Structure

Step 2

Access the page where you want syntax highlighter to be enabled and go the ‘Edit Mode’.  Add ‘Content Editor Web Part’ to the page. This Web Part will contain the scripts that provides reference to the syntax highlighter code uploaded in SharePoint server.

Add Content Editor Webpart

Step 3

View the Web Part options by clicking on the ‘Modify Shared Web Part’ menu. Click on the ‘Source Editor’ and enter the scripts to call syntax highlighter.

Select Source Editor

<LINK href="/sites/Shared Documents/syntax/styles/shCore.css" type=text/css rel=stylesheet>
<LINK href="/sites/Shared Documents/syntax/styles/shThemeDefault.css" type=text/css rel=stylesheet>
<SCRIPT src="/sites/Shared Documents/syntax/scripts/shCore.js" type=text/javascript></SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT src="/sites/Shared Documents/syntax/scripts/shBrushJScript.js" type=text/javascript></SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type=text/javascript>
    SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = '/sites/Shared Documents/syntax/scripts/clipboard.swf';
    SyntaxHighlighter.all();
</SCRIPT>

Note: Change the paths in the script if you have uploaded the syntaxhighlighter code in a different location

Step 4

Hide this Web Part by checking the ‘Hidden’ option.

Hide Layout

Step 5

Add 2nd Content Editor Web Part. This Web Part will contain the code which you want to highlight. Use the Source Editor and paste the code there.

Step 6

Wrap your code with the syntax highlighter wrapper codes, change the language value as per your code. Click Ok to view the syntax highlighted code

<pre class="brush: js">

Syntax Highlighter Info
App Name	Syntax Highlighter
License	free
Type	code
App URL
More Info	link

Skipfish is an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments.

Installation on Ubuntu/BackTrack (via Redspin)

Use the following commands in the terminal windows to install and run Skipfish. Replace OUTPUT_FOLDER and TARGETSITE with the domain name and the target’s URL respectively. Also change the wget URL to the URL of the latest version of Skipfish download available.

wget http://skipfish.googlecode.com/files/skipfish-1.29b.tgz
tar zxvf skipfish-1.01b.tgz
sudo apt-get install libidn11-dev
cd skipfish
make
cp dictionaries/default.wl skipfish.wl
./skipfish -o OUTPUT_FOLDER http://www.TARGETSITE.com

Trial Run

Installed SkipFish and ran on the target site, specs below.

Guest OS : BackTrack4 VM

Host OS : Windows Vista

RAM : 512MB

Application Size : Medium ( < 1000 Unique Pages )

Internet Speed : 1 MBPS

Skipfish Verbose

Skipfish displays the scan run statistics continuously during the run. Once the scan run is complete, we get to see the scan summary (shown in the below screenshot).

Skipfish Console (Click to Enlarge)

Scan Output

Once the scan is complete, results are saved in HTML format. Its a simple tree interface that displays the details of the vulnerability along with the HTTP Header trace for each request.

NOTE: The target application which was used to test the application is a custom and private application and has been removed from the server. Please do not run scanner on any of the domains you dont own.

Skipfish Scan Report (Click to Enlarge)

Observations

• Installation and setup is super easy.
• Definitely not a heavy weight, memory hogging scanner.
• Did not find some of the basic vulnerabilities other scanners had found.
• Scan ran for ~14hours for that medium sized app.

Features

• High speed: pure C code, highly optimized HTTP handling, minimal CPU footprint – easily achieving 2000 requests per second with responsive targets.

• Ease of use: heuristics to support a variety of quirky web frameworks and mixed-technology sites, with automatic learning capabilities, on-the-fly wordlist creation, and form autocompletion.

• Cutting-edge security logic: high quality, low false positive, differential security checks, capable of spotting a range of subtle flaws, including blind injection vectors.

The tool is believed to support Linux, FreeBSD 7.0+, MacOS X, and Windows (Cygwin) environments.

List of High and Medium Vulnerabilities Skipfish Attempts to Identify

A rough list of the security checks, for High and Medium vulnerabilties, offered by the tool is outlined below.

• High risk flaws (potentially leading to system compromise):
  • Server-side SQL injection (including blind vectors, numerical parameters).
  • Explicit SQL-like syntax in GET or POST parameters.
  • Server-side shell command injection (including blind vectors).
  • Server-side XML / XPath injection (including blind vectors).
  • Format string vulnerabilities.
  • Integer overflow vulnerabilities.
  • Locations accepting HTTP PUT.

• Medium risk flaws (potentially leading to data compromise):
  • Stored and reflected XSS vectors in document body (minimal JS XSS support present).
  • Stored and reflected XSS vectors via HTTP redirects.
  • Stored and reflected XSS vectors via HTTP header splitting.
  • Directory traversal (including constrained vectors).
  • Assorted file POIs (server-side sources, configs, etc).
  • Attacker-supplied script and CSS inclusion vectors (stored and reflected).
  • External untrusted script and CSS inclusion vectors.
  • Mixed content problems on script and CSS resources (optional).
  • Incorrect or missing MIME types on renderables.
  • Generic MIME types on renderables.
  • Incorrect or missing charsets on renderables.
  • Conflicting MIME / charset info on renderables.
  • Bad caching directives on cookie setting responses.

Google Skipfish Info
App Name	Google Skipfish
License	free
Type	code
App URL
More Info	link

Websecurify is a powerful web application security testing environment designed from the ground up to provide the best combination of automatic and manual vulnerability testing technologies. This tool automatically identifies web application vulnerabilities by using advanced discovery and fuzzing technologies.

Websecurify Scan in Progress

Running the Scanner

Initiating a scan with Websecurify is simple and is achieved in 2 steps.

1. Create a workspace with the target’s URL
2. and then just Start the scan

Once the Scan is Complete

Once the scan is complete, scan results are displayed, sorted based on the severity of the vulnerabilities discovered. Clicking on each of the category will further display the instances found and the technical details of analysis.

Websecurify Scan Complete - Issues Tab

Scan results can be rendered in a report format by clicking on the Report Tab and can be exported in CSV, HTM, XML and JSON formats.

Websecurify Scan Complete - Report Tab

Comments/Observations

1. A scan was initiated for an average sized application during evaluation of websecurify and following were identified
2. Memory consumption was increasing with time but its far better than many other free/commercial scanners
3. Progress of scan was normal till it reached almost 97% (in around 2 hrs), then it stayed in 97-98 and back to 97 for a loooong time. So I had it running and checked it the next day.
4. This tool doesn’t provide the statistics of the scan, like pages crawled, time consumed, etc.
5. This tool has the simplest interface of all the other tools available in the market.

This post talks about few portable ipod managers which can directly run from USB devices and sync with your iPods. If you don’t want to install the heavyweight iTunes in your PC, choose any of the apps discussed here.

Various apps discussed in this post are

1. Floola
2. iDump
3. YamiPod
4. SharePod
5. SongBird
6. MediaMonkey

1. Floola

Floola is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod (any model supporting iTunes except iPhone, iPod touch and latest iPod shuffle).

It’s a standalone application that can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation under Linux (any GTK2 distro), Mac OS X (10.3.9 or newer!) and Windows (98 or newer, including Windows 7).

Foola iPod Manager

Features

• Cross plattform
• Copy add and extract songs to and from iPod.
• Playlists -  Easily manage, import and export (m3u, pls) playlists.
• Last.fm
• Podcasts
• Web videos – add files to iPod just copying the page url
• Lyrics Support – even on older iPods (3G and above).
• Search for duplicates – Easily find duplicated songs on iPod.
• Convert audio and video incompatible formats

Download Page :

2. iDump

This program will allow you transfer your songs off your iPod to a PC. Connect you iPod and run iDump and you’ll have access to all your songs, select the songs you want to transfer then pick a destination directory and how you would like your songs to be named.

iDump iPod Manager

Features

• Output formatting – Gives you the option to select an output directory and the way the songs will be transferred.
• Unattended Transfer - deals with common errors like what to do if a song already exist on the destination drive etc.
• Search
• Playlists
• Export Playlists – This option will export all of your playlists in to the standard .m3u format.

Download Page :

3. YamiPod

YamiPod is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod under Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation. Take a look at the feature list to find out what it can do and feel free to suggest anything that might be missing.

Yamipod iPod Manager

Features

Download Page:

4. SharePod

SharePod was designed from the start to be lightweight, quick and responsive ipod manager

Sharepod iPod Manager

Features

• Add & remove music and videos from your iPod
• Add, remove and edit playlists
• Add & remove album art
• View and backup photos
• Copy music, videos and playlists from your iPod to PC
• Import music/videos into your iTunes library, including playlists and ratings
• Tag editing
• Drag n’ drop to and from Explorer
• Simple, clean interface
• Quick to load and use with no unnessary complicated features
• Support for iPhone and iTouch (Thanks to Nikias Bassen, Paul Sladen, Jonathan Beck, and Christophe Fergeau for making this possible)

Download Page:

5. SongBird

Play your iPod from Songbird and synchronize it with your Songbird library (with the help of iPod device Songbird extension). We can even copy songs to your iPod or synchronize your iPod from your Songbird library.

Songbird iPod Sync

Features

• Sync – Add a song or build a playlist, and Songbird automatically syncs it to your phone or MP3 player
• Manage – Search, sort, stream, sync. Add Flickr photos, YouTube videos, song lyrics, and blogs for every artist on your playlist, even the tracks you stream over the Web. It’s all part of the mix.

Install iPod Device Support Addon to be able to sync the iPods

Download Page:

6. MediaMonkey

Sync with iPhones, iPods, and most any MP3 phone or Audio Device. Just click the Sync button to sync tracks, podcasts, and related properties such as Album Art, ratings, play history, and playlists.

Media Monkey - Music Organizer

Features

• Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface
• Create playlists and let Auto-DJ & Party Mode take care of your party.
• Sync iPhones, iPods, & MP3 players, converting & leveling tracks on-the-fly.

(Read this article to learn how to make MediaMonkey portable)

Download Page:

ZeroDayScan is an online web application scanner which crawls through the app and discovers the vulnerabilities in the application. It attempts to find out the common web vulnerabilities like XSS, SQL Injection and all the way down to web app fingerprinting.

As per their FAQ it takes around half an hour to scan normal sized websites, but as soon as I initiated scan for my website, I got a notification mail saying that it takes around 72 hours to complete the scan but I got the results emailed in about 5 hours.

Start the Scan

1. Create a text file with the name ‘zerodayscan.txt’ which contains the unique random key generated at zerodayscan.com site.
2. Submit the  Site URL and Email Id to which the scan results are to be mailed.
3. Start the scan. (Scan results will be emailed once its complete)

Scan Results

Output of the scan result is a pdf document which will be emailed to the user and contains the following information

1. Summary of the Scan (check the above pic)
2. Details of the Critical, High, Medium and Low Vulnerabilities
3. Whois information of the website.

Sample Summary Table in the Report

ZeroDay Scan Summary Table

The results gives us an approximate idea on the vulnerabilities of the target though it obviously does not have as much capabilities as a commercial webapp scanner.

Features

• No installation is required. It is an online service
• Detects Cross Site Scripting attacks (XSS)
• Detects Hidden Directories and Backup Files
• Looks for Known Security Vulnerabilities
• Searches for SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
• Automatically detects zero day bugs
• Performs Website Fingerprinting
• Generates free reports

I had mentioned in my previous post about Pendule – WebDeveloper Equivalent In Chrome, but lately the developer of WebDeveloper has released Chrome compatible version of this popular Firefox addon. WebDeveloper is definitely a favorite tool used by application security analysts and now it comes handy when you are testing your target in chrome. I think I’ll have to start a new series like SecFox, for Chrome.

WebDeveloper For Chrome (Click to Zoom)

Features (That can aid Security Testing)

• Clear Radio Buttons
• Convert GET to POST and POST to GET
• Convert Select Elements to Text input
• Display Form Details
• Enable Form Fields
• Make Form Fields Writable
• Remove Maxlength
• Show Passwords
• View Form Info
• Disable Image Alt Attributes
• Show Hidden Elements
• and much more…

NOTE: The Chrome compatible version doesn’t seem to be as stable as the one which is available for Firefox, but we can hope for the updates.

WebDeveloper for Chrome