Tool to scan for secret files on HTTP servers

snallygaster

Tool to scan for secret files on HTTP servers

what?

snallygaster is a tool that looks for files accessible on web servers that shouldn’t be public and can pose a security risk.

Typical examples include publicly accessible git repositories, backup files potentially containing passwords or database dumps. In addition it contains a few checks for other security vulnerabilities.

As an introduction to these kinds of issues you may want to watch this talk:

• Attacking with HTTP Requests

See the TESTS.md file for an overview of all tests and links to further information about the issues.

install

snallygaster is available via pypi:

pip3 install snallygaster

It’s a simple python 3 script, so you can just download the file “snallygaster” and execute it. Dependencies are urllib3, beautifulsoup4 and dnspython. In Debian- or Ubuntu-based distributions you can install them via:

apt install python3-dnspython python3-urllib3 python3-bs4

faq

Q: I want to contribute / send a patch / a pull request!

A: That’s great, but please read the CONTRIBUTIONS.md file.

Q: What’s that name?

A: Snallygaster is the name of a dragon that according to some legends was seen in Maryland and other parts of the US. There’s no particular backstory why this tool got named this way, other than that I was looking for a fun and interesting name.

I thought a name of some mythical creature would be nice, but most of those had the problem that I would have had name collisions with other software. Checking the list of dragons on Wikipedia I learned about the Snallygaster. The name sounded funny, the idea that there are dragon legends in the US interesting and I found no other piece of software with that name.

credit and thanks

• Thanks to Tim Philipp Schäfers and Sebastian Neef from the Internetwache for plenty of ideas about things to look for.
• Thanks to Craig Young for many discussions during the development of this script.
• Thanks to Sebastian Pipping for some help with Python programming during the development.
• Thanks to Benjamin Balder Bach for teachnig me lots of things about Python packaging.
• Thanks to the organizers of Bornhack, Driving IT, SEC-T and the Rights and Freedom track at 34C3 for letting me present this work.

author

snallygaster is developed and maintained by Hanno Böck.