DEPRECATION NOTICE

watchtower is now DEPRECATED. Please use chrisallenlane/drek instead. drek serves exactly the same purpose as watchtower, but is a superior piece of software.

Watchtower (1.4.8)

Chris Lane
chris@chris-allen-lane.com
http://chris-allen-lane.com
http://twitter.com/#!/chrisallenlane

What it Does

Watchtower is a Static Code Analysis tool designed to assist security auditors who are tasked with performing manual code reviews. It offers a robust alternative to grep for finding matches on literal and regex-based strings within a project. It can thus be used to locate (for example) dangerous functions calls that are made within an application.

Watchtower works best when it is targeted against a project on the local filesystem, but can also be directed to scan a website at a remote URL.

View an Example Report

Is this Readme TL;DR? Download /examples/report.html, and open it in a web-browser. It is an example report that was generated by Watchtower.

Specifically, it's an HTML-formatted report that was run against the Damn Vulnerable Web Application. If you spend a few minutes playing with this report, and you should quickly gain a feel for how Watchtower works. (Note that the report is somewhat large, so I recommend opening it in a fast browser like Google Chrome.)

Usage

There are essentially two use-cases for Watchtower:

Importing Scan Data into Your Own Application

Watchtower can be configured (via command-line options) to output as CSV, XML, or plain text:

# to output a CSV:
./watchtower -s /app/path/to/scan -o csv > /path/to/report/file.csv

# to output XML:
./watchtower -s /app/path/to/scan -o xml > /path/to/report/file.xml

# to output plain text:
./watchtower -s /app/path/to/scan -o txt

The CSV format is useful for importing scan data into a spreadsheet. The XML format is useful for importing scan data into a custom application. TXT is less likely to be useful, but it's there if you need it. (Know that you can colorize plain-text output with the --colorize flag if you're outputting directly to the terminal.)

Outputting a Sortable HTML Report for Direct Review

In my opinion, Watchtower's greatest feature is its ability to output an HTML report. Such a report can be a tremendous time-saver when scanning for signatures in large numbers of files.

This report is especially useful when auditing while running dual monitors, such that you can have the report open on one monitor, and your preferred IDE open on the other.

To generate the HTML report, run:

./watchtower -s /app/path/to/scan -p 'The Project Name' -o html > /path/to/report/file.html

Scanning a Remote Website

Watchtower can be instructed to scan a remote web site rather than the local filesystem. To do so, simply pass the -s (--scan) parameter a URL rather than a filesystem path:

./watchtower -s http://www.example.com -p 'example.com' -o html > /path/to/report/file.html

When scanning a remote website, Watchtower will first mirror the website locally using wget, and then will perform a standard scan on the downloaded page source. However:

• Be prepared to be patient, because it can take a long time to mirror a large website
• Watchtower will not be able to see as "deeply" into an application scanned remotely, because it will not have access to the application's underlying source (PHP, ASP, etc.)

Thus, scanning locally is strongly preferred to scanning remotely, if possible.

Configuration

Watchtower has an extensive configuration file. (A large number of configuration options have to do with formatting and content for HTML reporting.) Please read the comments in the config file itself (.config.rb) for more information.

Also, note that it's possible to specify which config file to use when executing Watchtower via the --config-file option. This is useful when you're working on several projects at once: rather than having to repeatedly change values within the config file, you may simply create alternate config files (config-project-one.rb, etc), and then specify which to use upon execution.

Signature Specification

Signatures live in <watchtower root>/signatures/ (by default), and are organized by file-type, and then by group:

$signatures[:filetype][:group]

As in:

$signatures[:php][:dangerous_functions] = [
	Signature.new({:literal => 'base64_decode('}),
	Signature.new({:literal => 'eval('}),
	Signature.new({:literal => 'exec('}),
]

Signature groupings will be respected when laying out an HTML report, so creating thoughtful groupings can make reports more navigable.

Creating New Signatures

If you're interested in creating a signature for a new file-type, do the following:

1. Open the config.rb file in your preferred editor, and scroll to the bottom of the file.
2. Locate the $configs[:ftype_ext] hash. This hash maps programming languages (like 'php') to the real-world file extensions (like 'php', 'php5', 'phtml', etc) that are associated with that programming language. See if a hash exists for your preferred language, and create one if not.
3. Create a new signatures file for that file-type. (I'd recommend that you simply copy, paste, and modify an existing signatures file.)
4. Slightly higher up in config.rb, list your signatures file in $configs[:signatures].

Signature Types

Signatures can be specified in two ways:

1. As a literal string
2. As a regular expression

To create a signature that matches a literal string, use the following structure:

$signatures[:php][:dangerous_functions] = [
	Signature.new({:literal => 'base64_decode('}),
	Signature.new({:literal => 'eval('}),
	Signature.new({:literal => 'exec('}),
]

To create a signature that matches a regular expression, do the following:

$signatures[:php][:hashes] = [
	Signature.new({:name => 'MD5',  :regex => '[0-9a-f]{32}'}),
	Signature.new({:name => 'SHA1', :regex => '[0-9a-f]{40}'}),
]

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't the HTML report format kind of unusable? What's the point of marking items "good" or "bad" or whatever when all of that work is going to be lost when I close my browser?

Your work won't be lost! Watchtower uses some clever HTML 5 to save your work automatically as you make changes to the report.

When I generate the same report multiple times, the order in which each signature appears often changes. Why?

This is happening because you're running Ruby 1.8. In Ruby 1.8, hashes were definitionally un-ordered, and thus the ordering of the signatures file is not guaranteed to be respected.

I currently don't plan to fix this, because this issue does not exist in Ruby 1.9.

When I scan a remote website, there seems to be a lot of duplicated content in the report.

This can happen on websites where each page is accessible at more than one URL. (This is common on blogs, for example, where each page may be accessible individually, on a category page, in an archive, etc.)

Currently there is no good workaround to this problem (other than to scan locally, if possible), but I plan to take a crack at fixing this in the future.

Contributing

I'm very interested in compiling signatures for popular 3rd-party frameworks. (For an example, look at /signatures/wordpress.rb, which is WordPress-specific.) If you have expertise in a popular framework (Joomla, Drupal, etc), and would like to contribute some signature files, please let me know.

Likewise, if you have expertise in a language (web or otherwise) that is not represented among the signatures, I invite you to share your expertise.

If you are looking to support this project financially, I encourage you to consider giving a few dollars to the EFF instead. Or, better yet, become a member!


Contact Me

Questions, concerns, bug reports, and feature requests may be directed to chris@chris-allen-lane.com. If you're able to express your thoughts in 140 characters or fewer ("It's great!", "It sucks!") you can also contact me on twitter.

License

This product is licensed under the GPL 3, and comes with absolutely no warranty, expressed or implied. See the LICENSE file for more information.