The Subgraph Blog

Vega Launch at FISL12 – Photo by Christian Guerreiro

One year ago today we launched the Vega beta at FISL 12. A lot has happened in the past year.

• Vega was included in BackTrack 5R1, the security testing Linux distribution downloaded millions of times.
• We have received lots of great feedback from our beta users.
• We fared well (for a beta!) in a rigorous comparison of many commercial and free/open source security tools.
• We were at OSCON, AppSecUSA, Confoo, and threw the best REcon to date.
• Vega was the topic of a lengthy article in issue #33 of Insecure Magazine. Some of the new features coming are described there in detail.

We’ve also been busy doing a lot of services: penetration tests, code reviews, reverse engineering. We do this to help fund the development of Vega.

So we’re now excited to announce that we’ve been working on a new release. The release will fix many bugs, and some of the new features include:

Automating Web Application Login

Vega now allows you to store authentication credentials as an ‘identity’ so that Vega can log in automatically during a scan. This includes basic, digest, and NTLM credentials.

For authenticating using forms, it is possible to associate stored login requests seen by the proxy with an identity. Vega can then replay those to log in when starting a scan.

Vega supports creation of ‘identities’ for scanning with authentication.

Adding a Login Request to a Macro

In the screenshot below, the user simply logs into the application through the Vega proxy, and then selects the stored login request during the creation of the macro. Binding this to an identity and then using the identity during a scan will let the scanner log itself in automatically prior to starting a scan.

Selecting requests for the macro identity.

Message Viewer Improvements

We’ve also cleaned up the message viewer, making the rendering nicer and adding small touches like searching (Ctrl-F) and menu-based copy and paste (right mouse click menu). For the module developer, it will be possible to tell the message viewer what to highlight and where to scroll to when a request is accessed through an alert.

Cleaner rendering in message viewer. Search, copy/paste, module-specified highlighting.

Module Refresh

Finally, we are doing a complete module refresh. This means existing modules will be made more reliable and efficient. And we have several new modules under development.

What’s next?

We don’t have a fixed date for the release – but it will be soon. You can always build from source if you want access to some of these features sooner. They’re in the develop branch of our github repository. Contact us if you’d like to help us test new features and we’ll make a special build if you are using Windows or OS X. Talk to us on IRC (freenode) in #subgraph.

Finally

We’ll be presenting Vega at Black Hat Arsenal 2012 in Las Vegas. Be sure to stop by and say hello if you’re going to be there.