Wbox – Testing HTTP

by Black on April 13, 2009 · 0 comments

in Open Source, Penetration Testing, Security tools

Wbox helps you to test your HTTP connections and other parameters. Basically this tool is not for pentesters, but for developers and testing professionals. It can be used as an input validator by penetration testers.

12 11 wbox Wbox Testing HTTP

Some interesting tests you can perform with this tool are:

  • Benchmarking how much time it takes to generate content for your web application.
  • Web server and web application stressing.
  • Testing virtual domains configuration without the need to alter your local resolver.
  • Check if your redirects are working correctly emitting the right HTTP code.
  • Test if the HTTP compression is working and if it is actually serving pages faster.
  • Use it as a configuration-less HTTP serverto share files! (see the server mode documentation at the end of the Wbox tutorial in this page, but it’s as simple as % wbox servermode webroot /tmp)

Sample :

The simplest way to use wbox is to call it with just one argument, an url:

% wbox www.sampleex.it www.google.it (64.233.183.99) port 80
0. 200 OK    3774 bytes    407 ms
1. 200 OK    (3767) bytes    273 ms
2. 200 OK    3767 bytes    304 ms
3. 200 OK    3767 bytes    260 ms
user terminated

WBOX

As you can see wbox in this mode of operation resembles the ping utility. For every performed HTTP request it shows the sequence number of the request (0.), the HTTP reply code and reason string (200 OK), the number of bytes received from the server (3774 bytes), and the time the request took to complete in milliseconds (407 ms). There are two details to note.

  • The number of received bytes includes the HTTP reply header, so it is not equal to the document length.
  • Every time it changes compared to the previous HTTP reply, the number of received bytes is put between parens, like in (3767)

Limiting the number of requests

By default wbox will continue to perform requests forever, until you don’t press Ctrl+C. After the url argument you can pass a number of options to wbox to alter its behaviour, one of this is an integer number specifying how many requests to perform.

% wbox www.sampleex.it/notexistingpage.html 1
WBOX www.google.it (64.233.183.103) port 80
0. 404 Not Found    1495 bytes    310 ms

This time wbox terminated after the first request was received.

OS Supported:

Linux All flavour

Download Wbox here

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