BlindElephant Web Application Fingerprinter

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The BlindElephant Web Application Fingerprinter attempts to discover the version of a (known) web application by comparing static files at known locations against precomputed hashes for versions of those files in all all available releases. The technique is fast, low-bandwidth, non-invasive, generic, and highly automatable.

Sourceforge Project Page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/blindelephant/
Discussion and Forums: http://www.qualys.com/blindelephant
License: LGPL

Getting Started

BlindElephant can be used directly as a tool on the command line, or as a library to provide fingerprinting functionality to another program.

Pre-requisites:

• Python 2.6.x (prefer 2.6.5); users of earlier versions may have difficulty installing or running BlindElephant.

Get the code:

• Browse SVN
• Checkout via SVN: svn co https://blindelephant.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/blindelephant/trunk blindelephant

Installation:

Installation is only required if you plan to use BlindElephant as a library. Make sure that your python installation has distutils, and then do:cd blindelephant/srcsudo python setup.py install(Windows users, omit sudo)

Example Usage (Command Line):

setup.py will have placed BlindElephant.py in your /usr/local/bin dir.

$ BlindElephant.py 
Usage: BlindElephant.py [options] url appName

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p PLUGINNAME, --pluginName=PLUGINNAME
                        Fingerprint version of plugin (should apply to web app
                        given in appname)
  -s, --skip            Skip fingerprinting webpp, just fingerprint plugin
  -n NUMPROBES, --numProbes=NUMPROBES
                        Number of files to fetch (more may increase accuracy).
                        Default: 15
  -w, --winnow          If more than one version are returned, use winnowing
                        to attempt to narrow it down (up to numProbes
                        additional requests).
  -l, --list            List supported webapps and plugins

Use "guess" as app or plugin name to attempt to attempt to
discover which supported apps/plugins are installed.

$ python BlindElephant.py http://laws.qualys.com movabletype
Loaded /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/blindelephant/dbs/movabletype.pkl with 96 versions, 2229 differentiating paths, and 209 version groups.
Starting BlindElephant fingerprint for version of movabletype at http://laws.qualys.com 

Fingerprinting resulted in:
4.22-en
4.22-en-COM
4.23-en
4.23-en-COM

Best Guess: 4.23-en-COM

Example Usage (Library):

$python
>>> from blindelephant.Fingerprinters import WebAppFingerprinter
>>> 
>>> #Construct the fingerprinter
>>> #use default logger pointing to console; can pass "logger" arg to change output
>>> fp = WebAppFingerprinter("http://laws.qualys.com", "movabletype")
>>> #do the fingerprint; data becomes available as instance vars
>>> fp.fingerprint()
(same as above)
>>> print "Possible versions:", fp.ver_list
Possible versions: [LooseVersion ('4.22-en'), LooseVersion ('4.22-en-COM'), LooseVersion ('4.23-en'), LooseVersion ('4.23-en-COM')]
>>> print "Max possible version: ", fp.best_guess
Max possible version:  4.23-en-COM

The Static File Fingerprinting Approach in One Picture

Other Projects Like This

• Sucuri Static File Fingerprinting tool: Initial web-based proof of concept for the static file approach
• WAFP: The Web Application FingerPrinter: Ruby implementation of the static file concept (fetches all possible static files)
• Morningstar Security WhatWeb: Hybrid approach supporting a huge variety of remote technologies. Primarily regex based, but uses static files to differentiate versions of some apps.

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More information about BlindElephant can be found on: http://blindelephant.sourceforge.net

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