Mastering Burp Suite: A Learning Roadmap 🗺️
This document is my personal roadmap for mastering Burp Suite, the industry-standard toolkit for web application penetration testing. I will add my notes to each section as I progress through the different levels of mastery.
Level 1: The Beginner - The Traffic Inspector 🕵️
Goal: To understand and control the flow of traffic between a browser and a target. This is the foundation for everything else.
Modules to Master:
- Proxy (Intercept): The core of Burp. I will learn to catch, forward, and drop requests and responses to see them in their raw format.
- Proxy (HTTP History): The logbook of all traffic. I will learn to use this to find interesting requests to analyze later.
- Target (Scope): A critical first step. I will learn to define a scope to focus only on my target, reducing noise and keeping my testing organized.
Goal: To actively manipulate and replay individual requests to find basic vulnerabilities.
Modules to Master:
- Repeater: This is for manual testing. I will practice sending interesting requests from the Proxy History to Repeater, modifying parameters (like user IDs, filenames, or commands), and analyzing how the server’s response changes.
- Decoder: A utility for converting data between different formats, like Base64, URL, and HTML encoding.
Level 3: The Advanced - The Automation Specialist 🤖
Goal: To automate sending thousands of requests to find vulnerabilities at scale that would be impossible to find manually.
Modules to Master:
- Intruder: Burp’s powerful automated attack tool. I will learn the different attack types (Sniper, Battering Ram, etc.) to perform tasks like brute-forcing login forms, fuzzing for input vulnerabilities (like SQL Injection), and discovering hidden content.
- Sequencer: An advanced tool for analyzing the randomness of session tokens to see if they are predictable.
Level 4: The Expert - The Extender 🛠️
Goal: To customize and extend Burp Suite’s capabilities to fit any testing scenario.
Modules to Master:
- Extender (BApp Store): I will learn to find, install, and use popular extensions from the community that add new features and scanning capabilities to Burp.
- Extender (APIs): A long-term goal is to learn how to write my own Burp extensions using Python to automate custom attacks and workflows.