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Auth Tests
Making a Testing Config

Metlo can automatically identify most BOLA, BFLA, IDOR and Broken Authentication vulnerabilities. To do this we require a little bit of configuration on the different resources and actors in your api as well as the permission relationships between them. This configuration is written in the settings page on the Testing Config tab.

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Hosts

The first step is to add some authentication configuration for each host that you want to make tests for.

Each host should has the following fields:

  • authType - One of basic, header, jwt, session_cookie
  • headerKey [optional] - The header your auth info is stored in
  • cookieName [optional] - The name of the cookie your auth info is stored in
  • jwtUserPath [optional] - The path of the user in your JWT token
host "www.example-using-header.com" {
    authType = "header",
    headerKey = "Authorization",
    testingHost = "staging.example.com"
}

host "www.example-using-cookie.com" {
    authType = "session_cookie",
    cookieName = "_session_key"
}

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Actors

After you define your hosts you can specify the different Actors in your API. An Actor is any agent that performs an action in your API. Most commonly you can either have User actors or APIKey actors.

Each actor should have a JSON list of items in it. Each item should be a dictionary with all the fields relevant to your Actor. Be sure to add an auth key in each item so we can authenticate your actor when making requests.

actor User {
    items = [
        {
            "uuid": "fb0bd533-3d87-4e67-925d-5d4fed5ffeda",
            "name": "Admin User",
            "role": "admin",
            "auth": "<An Admin Auth Key>"
        },
        {
            "uuid": "cfe3b553-186d-4ab3-a501-babcd26b1c73",
            "name": "Regular User",
            "role": "regular",
            "auth": "<A Regular User Auth Key>"
        }
    ]
}

​
Resources

Resources are the items that actors perform actions on. A resource has the following fields:

  • permissions - A list of strings that contains each permission for this resource, most commonly read or write
  • items - A list of different example resources
resource Product {
    permissions = ["read", "write"],

    items = [
        {
            "uuid": "96665ba0-e248-4360-83b9-cf1d6ffb727f",
            "name": "some test product"
        },
        {
            "uuid": "cbd8f3ed-12f9-4715-af91-471e063cbb55",
            "name": "another other test product"
        }
    ]
}

In addition to identifying the permissions and items for a resource you can also define the endpoints that use this resource. Here are a few examples:

resource Product {
    permissions = ["read", "write"],

    items = [ ... ],

    endpoints = [
        # All GET endpoints whose paths start with /product need read access to Product
        {
            "method": "GET",
            "path": "^/product/.*",
            "permissions": ["read"]
        },
        # All POST endpoints whose paths start with /product need write access to Product
        {
            "method": "POST",
            "path": "/product/.*",
            "permissions": ["write"]
        },
        # All PUT endpoints that contain the Product resource in the request path need write access to Product
        {
            "method": "PUT",
            "contains_resource": { "path": "req.path" },
            "permissions": ["write"]
        },
        # All DELETE endpoints whose host match ^.*\.product-service\.com need write access to product
        {
            "method": "DELETE",
            "host": "^.*\.product-service\.com"
            "permissions": ["write"]
        }
    ] 
}

​
Permissions

Finally, you can define the relations between your Actors and Resources using permissions.

# All Admin users have read and write access to all Products
has_permission(User(role="admin"), [ "read", "write" ], Product)

# All Users have read access to all Products
has_permission(User, [ "read" ], Product)

# User with uuid fb0bd533... has write access to Product with uuid 96665ba0...
has_permission(
    User(uuid="fb0bd533-3d87-4e67-925d-5d4fed5ffeda"),
    [ "write" ],
    Product(uuid="96665ba0-e248-4360-83b9-cf1d6ffb727f")
)

# User with uuid cfe3b553... has write access to Product with uuid cbd8f3ed...
has_permission(
    User(uuid="cfe3b553-186d-4ab3-a501-babcd26b1c73"),
    [ "write" ],
    Product(uuid="cbd8f3ed-12f9-4715-af91-471e063cbb55")
)

Metlo automatically generates auth test cases using these permissions!