Top 10 Burp Suite extensions to use in bug bounty hunting

Hello ethical hackers and bug bounty hunters. Today, you will learn the top 10 Burp Suite extensions I found myself using over and over again. They assist me in different areas, such as pretty-printing data, actively testing for specific vulnerability classes, parsing API definitions and brute-forcing.

Wsdler is your burp extension for SOAP

During your penetration testing or bug bounty hunting, you might encounter SOAP-based APIs. They are web services that you can consume according to a file which describes the actions they expose and how to call them. This file is based on the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).

Whenever you find one, you can parse it using Wsdler. Additionally, this Burp extension constructs the HTTP requests as the API expects them.

JSON Beautifier

Before Burp Suite rolled its Pretty button feature, this was the first extension I needed to install after any fresh Burp Suite setup. Nowadays, the majority of web application use RESTful APIs which generally use JSON objects to transfer data between the client and the server. JSON Beautifier prettifies the inline JSON data to make your life easier.

This Burp extension is free and can be used in either Burp Suite Community Edition or Professional.

J2EEScan is a great burp extension for Java EE applications

In my penetration testing assignments, I usually test J2EE web applications, which are Java web applications that support enterprise-level requirements, such as scalability and availability. Therefore, I use J2EEScan to assist me in finding vulnerabilities for the most common CVEs that target J2EE technologies.

The extension adds test cases to the BurpSuite Scanner. Therefore, there no additional configuration after you install it. All you have to do is run a scan and wait for vulnerabilities in the Issue Activity panel in the Burp’s Dashboard tab.

JSON WEB Tokens, the Burp extension, not the standard

According to jwt.io, JSON Web Token is:

[…] an open standard […] that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed.

When you do bug bounty hunting or web application penetration testing, it is a pain to manually copy the tokens from Burp Suite and paste them into your favourite parsing tool, such as jwt.io. This extension allows you to parse the token within Burp, the same way JSON Beautifier prettifies inline JSON objects.

SAML Raider

For those of you who don’t know what SAML, it’s a standard used in Single Sign-On (SSO) for authentication. Here is a brief definition from Wikipedia:

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) […] is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, in particular, between an identity provider and a service provider. SAML is an XML-based markup language for security assertions.

Since SAML requests contain long base64 encoded XML data, it is impractical to manually parse them. SAML Raider automatically performs the parsing within Burp Suite. Additionally, you can use it to perform known attacks against your target web application. In fact, it comes with pre-configured exploitation techniques, such as signature wrapping, that you can easily run to test for weaknesses in SAML implementations.

AuthMatrix burp extension for broken access control

I’ve already covered this great extension in a Youtube video. It allows you to test for broken access control vulnerabilities, such as IDOR, unprotected endpoints, etc. The flow is fairly simple. Firstly, you browse your target application and send any interesting requests to this extension. Then, you create the target users, such as the attacker and the victim. Then, for each user, you configure the session cookies, and any HTTP headers containing tokens such as JWT or API keys. Lastly, you hit the run button and let AuthMatrix highlight the suspicious requests in red.

HTTP request smuggler

This is the go-to Burp extension when you want to easily detect and exploit a web application through HTTP Request Smuggling.

It detects whether you have a CL.TE or TE.CL condition and reports it directly into Burp Suite’s Dashboard tab, under the Issue Activity menu where all the issues get listed.

If you have no clue about what do CL.TE and TE.CL means, I invite you to read this article from the authors of Burp Suite.

Turbo Intruder

This extension allows you to send large numbers of HTTP requests to a target web application. If you have Burp Community, you know that you can only work with a limited version of the Intruder which does not support multiple threads. Instead, you can use Turbo Intruder.

Since this Burp extension uses a Python snippet that you can edit, I recommend you get familiar with the basics of the Python programming language. That way, you can customize Turbo Intruder to bring more flexibility when you brute force.

Upload Scanner

Whenever you encounter a file upload feature that uses the multipart mime type, I encourage you to give this Burp extension a try. In fact, you can use it to probe the upload features for many security issues.

It fuzzes all the parameters using a set of organized categories that you can choose from. If the application retrieves the uploads, you can configure Upload Scanner to fetch the files to verify cases like XSS.

There are plenty of other features in this awesome Burp extension. I encourage you to learn more about it. Additionally, I prepared this Youtube video to show you how it works.

Java Deserialization Scanner

This Burp extension checks for insecure deserialization issues in Java applications. It uses pre-built serialized java objects to probe the application for a callback. You can configure this feedback to be either a time delay or a callback. If the application sleeps for some time before responding, or if you receive a hit as a callback, the extension highlights exactly what payload has triggered it. Therefore, you can prepare your own payload using tools such as ysoserial.

If you want to learn how insecure deserialization works and how to exploit it with real examples, I invite you to read this article.

Conclusion

There are so many tools, extensions and methodologies available a few clicks away. However, I should mention that you don’t have to use them all. Take some time to discover how they work, then pick the ones that suit your taste and your needs.

Hopefully, this episode has shown you some new Burp extensions that might help you in your next assignment.

Until the next episode, stay curious, keep learning and go find some bugs!