Before that, I have used Stefano’s Tool, SWFIntruder. It is a nice tool to audit Actionscript 2 apps, but it only reports XSS issues and does not support Actionscript 3. This time, I was out of luck, since I needed to audit a Actionscript 3 App. Also, I could not decompile and study its source code since the free tool Flare does not work on Actionscript 3.

So, I decided to give HP’s tool a try. I had a lot of expectations from this tool, since HP already has a popular tool WebInspect which is known in the industry for its website and web services auditing capabilities. I ran this tool on my app and it decompiled beautifully the complete source code of the flash app. It has a useful search feature which can aid in manually studying source code for vulnerabilities. However, I wanted to see some of its automatic auditing capabilities. So, I ran the scan and found it to find some issues like crypto issues(sha0/sha1), stacktraces, etc. Apart from that, it didn’t report any serious issues like XSS, etc. It also does report a large number of false positives in checks that start with “Possible/Potentially – - – -”. But i am willing to ignore those as long as the tool can effectively find some important vulnerabilities.

I didn’t know my app had any XSS issues or not, so I decided to use the free test.swf which is provided as part of SWFIntruder.

To my surprise, HP’s SWFScan tool did not report any of the 5 XSS issues reported by SWFIntruder.

If you see the screenshots below, swfscan shows you the vulnerabilities it found and the decompiled source code. Using manual inspection, a penetration tester can easily locate XSS issues in parameters such as _root.obj and _root.sd which are directly written into html without any escaping/filtering. I hope this free SWFScan tool improves in the near future and does not miss auditing such simple vulnerabilities.

“You can even completely hide your private folders from virtually all applications, and such folders would remain invisible until you enter a valid password.”

Is this really true?? No, not at all. Let’s see how. Actually, my friend used one of these softwares and challenged me if I can expose his data without the password used to lock the data. So, I decided to give it a try.

I first downloaded and installed a trial copy of Folder Guard software on my computer. Then I created a folder named “mysecretfiles” inside directory “test” on G: drive. Then, I opened Folder Guard, created a login password and locked this folder. The configuration setting I used for this folder was Access = “No Access” and Visibility = “Hidden”. You should see a similar screenshot after you lock a folder.

I closed Folder Guard and clicked on “Yes” in the “Start Protecting the System” dialog box. This caused Folder Guard to enable protection on my folder. As a result, I didn’t see my locked folder in Windows Explorer.

I tried to understand how these softwares work. Almost all of them placed hooks into the windows device drivers and block access calls to locked files and folders. This model is flawed because an attacker can use the back channel, often referred to as Direct Disk Access Mode.

So, I decided to fire my favorite Disk Editor WinHex and I could easily see and browse my locked folder with ease. I could look inside my locked file “mysensitivedata.txt” and check its contents with my username, password and SSN . The other best part of this disk editor is that I don’t need to install it, I could just easily run it from a USB pen stick.

So, the best protection to protect your data is still to use industry standard encryption with algorithms such as AES, 3DES, etc. Even if the data falls in wrong hands, the confidentiality of the data won’t be compromised. Use softwares like TrueCrypt to protect your sensitive data.

A web page is composed of three major content types, namely HTML content, Javascript Code and CSS styling code. I felt the need of a tool that could beautify or format the entire web page source code. I use Burp Suite, my favorite web proxy tool. However, it does not have source code formatting feature, it just colors the web page by choosing different colors for html tag names, html attribute values, javascript, css, etc.

I looked on the internet for free alternatives, but I could not find free tools that could format the entire web page. Most of them could only format either one of HTML or Javascript or CSS. So, I decided to write a perl script myself. I used the libraries HTML::Tidy by Dave Raggett and Javascript::Beautifier by Einars Lielmanis. And I have written my own CSS formatting code.

Example of HTML Formatting

Example of CSS Formatting

Example of Javascript Formatting

In addition, I have done one more improvement by formatting the javascript code in html event handlers. I picked the comprehensive event handlers list from XSS Attacks Book by RSnake, Jeremiah, Pdp, Anton Rager and Seth Fogie. Another excellent book to have on your shelf.

Example of Event Handler Code Formatting (see the onload and onclick event handlers)

And finally the …

Inferno’s All-In-One HTML + Javascript + CSS Formatter
Paste your Source Code below

I would advise trying any of the search engines’ source code like google, yahoo, etc. Their code is highly compressed. If you have any problem using the text box above, try using this Link.

Plans for future additions include
* Add custom event handlers and variables (e.g. expr variable in Samy Worm Code)
* Javascript Deobfuscation
* More configuration Options
* Burp Proxy Plugin

Please provide your valuable suggestions to improve this tool. This tool is completely free for your use.