Easy Directory Traversal with Burp

Often, I'll use Burp Suite's directory traversal Intruder payload list. A step exists that must be performed in order to effectively leverage the traversal payload. We'll briefly cover this.

Intruder with the insertion point (fuzzing the file parameter)

Burp's fuzzing-path traversal payload, available under the preset list payload set, has a placeholder that represents the filename you'd like to fuzz for. This placeholder "{FILE} ", must be substituted with an actual filename (ex: /etc/passwd).

Payload processing rule added, match replace, regular expression form \{FILE\}

As you can see, the additional step was adding a payload processing rule. We chose match/replace, escaped characters that represent regular expressions (curly braces {}) by placing a backslash in front of them and replaced them with etc/passwd.

Lastly, don't forget to select/deselect the URL-encoding of characters based on your needs.

HTH,

cktricky