DAST browser-based crawler (ULTIMATE)

Introduced in GitLab 13.12.

WARNING: This product is an early access and is considered a beta feature.

GitLab DAST's new browser-based crawler is a crawl engine built by GitLab to test Single Page Applications (SPAs) and traditional web applications. Due to the reliance of modern web applications on JavaScript, handling SPAs or applications that are dependent on JavaScript is paramount to ensuring proper coverage of an application for Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST).

The browser-based crawler works by loading the target application into a specially-instrumented Chromium browser. A snapshot of the page is taken prior to a search to find any actions that a user might perform, such as clicking on a link or filling in a form. For each action found, the crawler will execute it, take a new snapshot and determine what in the page changed from the previous snapshot. Crawling continues by taking more snapshots and finding subsequent actions.

The benefit of crawling by following user actions in a browser is that the crawler can interact with the target application much like a real user would, identifying complex flows that traditional web crawlers don’t understand. This results in better coverage of the website.

Scanning a web application with both the browser-based crawler and GitLab DAST should provide greater coverage, compared with only GitLab DAST. The new crawler does not support API scanning or the DAST AJAX crawler.

Enable browser-based crawler

The browser-based crawler is an extension to the GitLab DAST product. DAST should be included in the CI/CD configuration and the browser-based crawler enabled using CI/CD variables:

1. Install the DAST prerequisites.
2. Include the DAST CI template.
3. Set the target website using the DAST_WEBSITE CI/CD variable.
4. Set the CI/CD variable DAST_BROWSER_SCAN to true.

An example configuration might look like the following:

include:
  - template: DAST.gitlab-ci.yml

variables:
  DAST_WEBSITE: "https://example.com"
  DAST_BROWSER_SCAN: "true"

Available variables

The browser-based crawler can be configured using CI/CD variables.

CI/CD variable	Type	Example	Description
DAST_WEBSITE	URL	http://www.site.com	The URL of the website to scan.
DAST_BROWSER_SCAN	boolean	true	Configures DAST to use the browser-based crawler engine.
DAST_BROWSER_ALLOWED_HOSTS	List of strings	site.com,another.com	Hostnames included in this variable are considered in scope when crawled. By default the DAST_WEBSITE hostname is included in the allowed hosts list.
DAST_BROWSER_EXCLUDED_HOSTS	List of strings	site.com,another.com	Hostnames included in this variable are considered excluded and connections are forcibly dropped.
DAST_BROWSER_IGNORED_HOSTS	List of strings	site.com,another.com	Hostnames included in this variable are accessed but not reported against.
DAST_BROWSER_MAX_ACTIONS	number	10000	The maximum number of actions that the crawler performs. For example, clicking a link, or filling a form.
DAST_BROWSER_MAX_DEPTH	number	10	The maximum number of chained actions that the crawler takes. For example, Click -> Form Fill -> Click is a depth of three.
DAST_BROWSER_NUMBER_OF_BROWSERS	number	3	The maximum number of concurrent browser instances to use. For shared runners on GitLab.com we recommended a maximum of three. Private runners with more resources may benefit from a higher number, but will likely produce little benefit after five to seven instances.
DAST_BROWSER_COOKIES	dictionary	abtesting_group:3,region:locked	A cookie name and value to be added to every request.
DAST_BROWSER_LOG	List of strings	brows:debug,auth:debug	A list of modules and their intended log level.
DAST_AUTH_URL	string	https://example.com/sign-in	The URL of page that hosts the sign-in form.
DAST_USERNAME	string	user123	The username to enter into the username field on the sign-in HTML form.
DAST_PASSWORD	string	p@55w0rd	The password to enter into the password field on the sign-in HTML form.
DAST_USERNAME_FIELD	selector	id:user	A selector describing the username field on the sign-in HTML form.
DAST_PASSWORD_FIELD	selector	css:.password-field	A selector describing the password field on the sign-in HTML form.
DAST_SUBMIT_FIELD	selector	xpath://input[@value='Login']	A selector describing the element that when clicked submits the login form or the password form of a multi-page login process.
DAST_FIRST_SUBMIT_FIELD	selector	.submit	A selector describing the element that when clicked submits the username form of a multi-page login process.

The DAST variables SECURE_ANALYZERS_PREFIX, DAST_FULL_SCAN_ENABLED, DAST_AUTO_UPDATE_ADDONS, DAST_EXCLUDE_RULES, DAST_REQUEST_HEADERS, DAST_HTML_REPORT, DAST_MARKDOWN_REPORT, DAST_XML_REPORT, DAST_INCLUDE_ALPHA_VULNERABILITIES, DAST_PATHS_FILE, DAST_PATHS, DAST_ZAP_CLI_OPTIONS, and DAST_ZAP_LOG_CONFIGURATION are also compatible with browser-based crawler scans.

Selectors

Selectors are used by CI/CD variables to specify the location of an element displayed on a page in a browser. Selectors have the format type:search string. The crawler will search for the selector using the search string based on the type.

Selector type	Example	Description
css	css:.password-field	Searches for a HTML element having the supplied CSS selector. Selectors should be as specific as possible for performance reasons.
id	id:element	Searches for an HTML element with the provided element ID.
name	name:element	Searches for an HTML element with the provided element name.
xpath	xpath://*[@id="my-button"]/a	Searches for a HTML element with the provided XPath. Note that XPath searches are expected to be less performant than other searches.
None provided	a.click-me	Defaults to searching using a CSS selector.

Vulnerability detection

While the browser-based crawler crawls modern web applications efficiently, vulnerability detection is still managed by the standard DAST/Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) solution.

The crawler runs the target website in a browser with DAST/ZAP configured as the proxy server. This ensures that all requests and responses made by the browser are passively scanned by DAST/ZAP. When running a full scan, active vulnerability checks executed by DAST/ZAP do not use a browser. This difference in how vulnerabilities are checked can cause issues that require certain features of the target website to be disabled to ensure the scan works as intended.

For example, for a target website that contains forms with Anti-CSRF tokens, a passive scan will scan as intended because the browser displays pages/forms as if a user is viewing the page. However, active vulnerability checks run in a full scan will not be able to submit forms containing Anti-CSRF tokens. In such cases we recommend you disable Anti-CSRF tokens when running a full scan.

Managing scan time

It is expected that running the browser-based crawler will result in better coverage for many web applications, when compared to the normal GitLab DAST solution. This can come at a cost of increased scan time.

You can manage the trade-off between coverage and scan time with the following measures:

• Limit the number of actions executed by the browser with the variable DAST_BROWSER_MAX_ACTIONS. The default is 10,000.
• Limit the page depth that the browser-based crawler will check coverage on with the variable DAST_BROWSER_MAX_DEPTH. The crawler uses a breadth-first search strategy, so pages with smaller depth are crawled first. The default is 10.
• Vertically scaling the runner and using a higher number of browsers with variable DAST_BROWSER_NUMBER_OF_BROWSERS. The default is 3.

Debugging scans using logging

Logging can be used to help you troubleshoot a scan.

The CI/CD variable DAST_BROWSER_LOG configures the logging level for particular modules of the crawler. Each module represents a component of the browser-based crawler and is separated so that debug logs can be configured just for the area of the crawler that requires further inspection. For more details, see Crawler modules.

For example, the following job definition enables the browsing module and the authentication module to be logged in debug-mode:

include:
  - template: DAST.gitlab-ci.yml

variables:
  DAST_WEBSITE: "https://my.site.com"
  DAST_BROWSER_SCAN: "true"
  DAST_BROWSER_LOG: "brows:debug,auth:debug"

Log message format

Log messages have the format [time] [log level] [log module] [message] [additional properties]. For example, the following log entry has level INFO, is part of the CRAWL log module, and has the message Crawled path.

2021-04-21T00:34:04.000 INF CRAWL Crawled path nav_id=0cc7fd path="LoadURL [https://my.site.com:8090]"

Crawler modules

The modules that can be configured for logging are as follows:

Log module	Component overview
AUTH	Used for creating an authenticated scan.
BROWS	Used for querying the state/page of the browser.
BPOOL	The set of browsers that are leased out for crawling.
CRAWL	Used for the core crawler algorithm.
DATAB	Used for persisting data to the internal database.
LEASE	Used to create browsers to add them to the browser pool.
MAIN	Used for the flow of the main event loop of the crawler.
NAVDB	Used for persistence mechanisms to store navigation entries.
REPT	Used for generating reports.
STAT	Used for general statistics while running the scan.