For those who are not aware, Arachni is a fully automated system which tries to enforce the fire and forget principle. As soon as a scan is started it will not bother you for anything nor require further user interaction. Upon completion, the scan results will be saved in a file which you can later convert to several different formats (HTML, Plain Text, XML, etc.)
The project was initially started as an educational exercise though it has since evolved into a powerful and modular framework allowing for fast, accurate and flexible security/vulnerability assessments..
More than that, Arachni is highly extend-able allowing for anyone to improve upon it by adding custom components and tailoring most aspects to meet most needs.
The author notified us of a major new release (v0.3) which has some great new features, a few of those being:
- A new custom-written, lightweight Spider
- Add-on support for the WebUI
- Scan scheduler
- AutoDeploy — Convert any SSH enabled Linux box into a Dispatcher
- Improved accuracy of differential analysis audits
- Improved accuracy of timing attack audits
- Highly optimized timing attacks
If you are interested in the WebUI aspect you can check out some screenshots here, the more comprehensive ChangeLog is also available here.
For those of you into benchmarking and testing you might be interested to know that during a recent test Arachni was the only (from a long list of commercial and F/OSS systems) that hit 100% on both XSS and SQLi tests in the WAVSEP benchmark:
Commercial Web Application Scanner Benchmark
The author is doing a great job with this tool and rapidly closing the gap between free security scanners and the very expensive commercial options. If you do have any feedback on Arachni v0.3 drop a comment here or hit up the Arachni Google Group.
You can download Arachni v0.3 here:
Or read more here.
