Getting Started With Burp Proxy
Burp Proxy lies at the heart of Burp's user-driven workflow. It operates
as a web proxy server between your browser and target applications, and lets
you intercept, inspect and modify the raw traffic passing in both
directions.
Note: Using Burp Proxy may result in unexpected effects
in some applications. Until you are fully familiar with its functionality
and settings, you should only use Burp Proxy against non-production systems.
To start getting to know Burp Proxy, carry out the following steps:
- First, ensure that Burp is
installed and running,
and that you have configured
your browser to work with Burp.
- In Burp, go to the Proxy Intercept tab, and ensure that interception
is on (if the button says "Intercept is off" then click it to toggle the
interception status).
- In your browser, visit any URL. The browser will sit waiting until
the request completes.
- In Burp, go to the Proxy Intercept tab. You should see your
browser's request displayed for you to view and edit. Click through each
of the message editor tabs (Raw, Headers, etc.) to see the different
ways of analyzing the message.
- Click the "Forward" button to send the request to the server. In
most cases, your browser will make more than one request in order to
display the page (for images, etc.). Look at each subsequent request and
then forward it to the server. When there are no more requests to
forward, your browser should have finished loading the URL you
requested.
- In your browser, click the Refresh button to reload the current
page.
- In Burp, this time edit the request in the Proxy Intercept tab.
Change the URL in the first line of the request so that a nonexistent
item is requested. Forward the request (and any subsequent ones) to the
server. Then look back in your browser. Although your browser requested
the same URL as before, you should see a "Not found" message, because
you changed the actual outgoing request on the fly, within Burp.
- In Burp, go to the Proxy History tab. This contains a table of all
HTTP messages that have passed through the Proxy. Select an item in the
table, and look at the HTTP messages in the request and response tabs.
If you select the item that you modified, you will see separate tabs for
the original and modified requests.
- Click on a column header in the Proxy history. This sorts the
contents of the table according to that column. Click the same header
again to reverse-sort on that column, and again to clear the sorting and
show items in the default order. Try this for different columns.
- Within the history table, click on a cell in the leftmost column,
and choose a color from the drop-down menu. This will highlight that row
in the selected color. In another row, double-click within the Comment
column and type a comment. You can use highlights and comments to
annotate the history and identify interesting items.
- Above the history table there is a filter bar. Click on the filter
bar to show the options available. Try changing the filter settings in
various ways, and see the effect on what is shown in the history table.
When the Proxy history has become very large, you can use the filter to
hide certain types of items, to help find items you are looking for.
- Select an item in the history, and show the context menu (usually,
by right-clicking your mouse). The options on the context menu are used
to drive your testing workflow within Burp. Choose "Send to Repeater",
and go to the Repeater tab. You will see the selected request has been
copied into the Repeater tool, for
further testing. For more details on sending items between Burp tools,
and the overall testing workflow, see
Using Burp Suite.
- Go to the Proxy Options tab, and look at all the options that are
available. These can be used to change the behavior of the Proxy
listeners, define rules to determine what request and response messages
are intercepted by the Proxy, perform automatic modification of
messages, and control the Proxy's behavior in other ways. For more
details, see Burp Proxy Options.
Use the links below for further help on starting to use Burp Proxy:
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
1.7.10
This release adds some new APIs that extensions can use to easily implement powerful scan checks and other logic that involves response diffing.
On Friday, to coincide with our Backslash Powered Scanning talk at Black Hat EU, we will be releasing an extension to the BApp Store that demonstrates how the new APIs can be used to create powerful new scanning capabilities.
See all release notes ›