Network Security Tools

Parsing the Input File

If we have made it this far in the execution cycle, we know the user has provided two arguments, so we assume the first one is the input file and we attempt to open it. If the open fails, the script dies and prints the error to the screen. If the open succeeds, we populate the @requestArray array with the contents of the input file:

# Open input file
open(IN, "<", $ARGV[0]) or die"ERROR => Can't open file $ARGV[0].\n";  
my @requestArray = <IN>;

Now that we have opened our input file, the @requestArray array contains all the requests that were extracted from the input file. At this point, we can begin to process each request in the array by performing a foreach loop on the array members.

Tip

We use the following request for all our examples:

GET /public/content/jsp/news.jsp?id=2&view=F

At this point in the script, we also declare a few other variables: specifically, $oResponse and $oStatus (the response content and status code generated by our request), and two hashes for storing a log of all directory- and parameter-based test combinations we perform. We use the log hashes primarily to ensure that we do not make duplicate test requests (we discuss this in greater detail later in the chapter). As we perform each loop, we assign the original request from the input file to the $oRequest variable:

my ($oRequest,$oResponse, $oStatus, %dirLog, %paramLog); printReport("\n** Beginning Scan **\n\n"); # Loop through each of the input file requests foreach $oRequest (@requestArray) ...