Prodder

To jab or poke, as with a pointed object.

Or

To goad to action; incite.

Purpose

This test suite contains a collection of very opinionated security-related tests, intended for general usage against most types of web application. You can run the tests out-of-the-box or use them as a starting point for more domain specific tests.

Currently the tests cover:

• security-minded HTTP headers
• checking for open ports
• issues with SSL configuration

Installation

Most of the test suite is a Ruby application. I'm going to assume you're familiar with Ruby and have bundler installed.

bundle install

SSLyze is used for the SSL functionality and needs to be available on your path when running the test suite. SSLyze is a python application and can be installed via pip with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Note that I'm currenly using a slighly older version of SSLyze as it is available in pure Python, which makes installation a little easier.

Usage

HOST=yourwebsitehere bundle exec rake

Note that environment variable for HOST, set this to the site you want to test. This should run through the test suite and output results which will look something like:

Scenario: Check certificate renegotiations
  When we test certificate renegotiation
  Then the output should contain "Client-initiated Renegotiations: Rejected"
  And the output should contain "Secure Renegotiation: Supported"

Here is a very short video on asciinema of some of the tests in action.

As for what all the tests are doing, I'd recommend reading the test output or the features in the features directory.

Advanced usage

If you only want to run part of the test suite you can, either by using cucumber directly or using the following rake tasks. Rake will let you list the available commands like so:

bundle exec rake -T

Which should return something like:

rake prod:all      # Run all probes
rake prod:headers  # Only run the headers probes
rake prod:ports    # Only run the ports probes
rake prod:ssl      # Only run the ssl probes

Reuse

The steps used as part of this test suite are now part of a gem, called prodder-steps.

In order to use these in your own cucumber features you can simply include the following in features/support/env.rb or similar:

require 'prodder-steps/cucumber'

In order to use this you'll first need to include prodder-steps in your Gemfile:

gem "prodder-steps"

Opinions?

As noted above this specific test suite is pretty opinionated. I'm interested in pull requests to challenge those opinions – it would be nice if as a broad community we could agree on some best practices.

Thanks

Thanks to nabla-c0d3 for SSLyze which does most of the work for the SSL tests.

Thanks also to the folks behind Gauntlt. I've borrowed some of the ideas but found myself wanting to start smaller. This project is all about strong options, whereas Gauntlt takes much more of an integrated framework approach. If you've not used Gauntlt already you should check it out.