AQUATONE - A Tool for Domain Flyovers

AQUATONE is a set of tools for performing reconnaissance on domain names. It can discover subdomains on a given domain by using open sources as well as the more common subdomain dictionary brute force approach. After subdomain discovery, AQUATONE can then scan the hosts for common web ports and HTTP headers, HTML bodies and screenshots can be gathered and consolidated into a report for easy analysis of the attack surface.

Installation

Dependencies AQUATONE depends on Node.js and NPM package manager for its web page screenshotting capabilities. Follow this guide for Installation instructions. You will also need a newer version of Ruby installed. If you plan to use AQUATONE in Kali Linux, you are already set up with this. If not, it is recommended to install Ruby with RVM. Finally, the tool itself can be installed with the following command in a terminal:

$ gem install aquatone

IMPORTANT: AQUATONE's screenshotting capabilities depend on being run on a system with a graphical desktop environment. It is strongly recommended to install and run AQUATONE in a Kali linux virtual machine. I will not provide support or bug fixing for other systems than Kali Linux.

Usage

Discovery The first stage of an AQUATONE assessment is the discovery stage where subdomains are discovered on the target domain using open sources, services and the more common dictionary brute force approach:

$ aquatone-discover --domain example.com

aquatone-discover will find the target's nameservers and shuffle DNS lookups between them. Should a lookup fail on the target domain's nameservers, aquatone-discover will fall back to using Google's public DNS servers to maximize discovery. The fallback DNS servers can be changed with the --fallback-nameservers option:

$ aquatone-discover --domain example.com --fallback-nameservers 87.98.175.85,5.9.49.12

Tuning aquatone-discover will use 5 threads as default for concurrently performing DNS lookups. This provides reasonable performance but can be tuned to be more or less aggressive with the --threads option:

$ aquatone-discover --domain example.com --threads 25

Hammering a DNS server with failing lookups can potentially be picked up by intrusion detection systems, so if that is a concern for you, you can make aquatone-discover a bit more stealthy with the --sleep and --jitter options. --sleep accepts a number of seconds to sleep between each DNS lookup while --jitter accepts a percentage of the --sleep value to randomly add or subtract to or from the sleep interval in order to break the sleep pattern and make it less predictable.

$ aquatone-discover --domain example.com --sleep 5 --jitter 30

Please note that setting the --sleep option will force the thread count to one. The --jitter option will only be considered if the --sleep option has also been set.

API keys Some of the passive collectors will require API keys or similar credentials in order to work. Setting these values can be done with the --set-key option:

$ aquatone-discover --set-key shodan o1hyw8pv59vSVjrZU3Qaz6ZQqgM91ihQ

All keys will be saved in ~/aquatone/.keys.yml.

Results When aquatone-discover is finished, it will create a hosts.txt file in the ~/aquatone/ folder, so for a scan of example.comit would be located at ~/aquatone/example.com/hosts.txt. The format will be a comma-separated list of hostnames and their IP, for example:

example.com,93.184.216.34
www.example.com,93.184.216.34
secret.example.com,93.184.216.36
cdn.example.com,192.0.2.42

... In addition to the hosts.txt file, it will also generate a hosts.json which includes the same information but in JSON format. This format might be preferable if you want to use the information in custom scripts and tools. hosts.json will also be used by the aquatone-scan and aquatone-gather tools. See aquatone-discover --help for more options.

Scanning The scanning stage is where AQUATONE will enumerate the discovered hosts for open TCP ports that are commonly used for web services:

$ aquatone-scan --domain example.com

The --domain option will look for hosts.json in the domain's AQUATONE assessment directory, so in the example above it would look for ~/aquatone/example.com/hosts.json. This file should be present if aquatone-discover --domain example.com has been run previously.

Ports By default, aquatone-scan will scan the following TCP ports: 80, 443, 8000, 8080 and 8443. These are very common ports for web services and will provide a reasonable coverage. Should you want to specifiy your own list of ports, you can use the --ports option:

$ aquatone-scan --domain example.com --ports 80,443,3000,8080

Instead of a comma-separated list of ports, you can also specify one of the built-in list aliases:

small: 80, 443
medium: 80, 443, 8000, 8080, 8443 (same as default)
large: 80, 81, 443, 591, 2082, 2095, 2096, 3000, 8000, 8001, 8008, 8080, 8083, 8443, 8834, 8888, 55672
huge: 80, 81, 300, 443, 591, 593, 832, 981, 1010, 1311, 2082, 2095, 2096, 2480, 3000, 3128, 3333, 4243, 4567, 4711, 4712, 4993, 5000, 5104, 5108, 5280, 5281, 5800, 6543, 7000, 7396, 7474, 8000, 8001, 8008, 8014, 8042, 8069, 8080, 8081, 8083, 8088, 8090, 8091, 8118, 8123, 8172, 8222, 8243, 8280, 8281, 8333, 8337, 8443, 8500, 8834, 8880, 8888, 8983, 9000, 9043, 9060, 9080, 9090, 9091, 9200, 9443, 9800, 9981, 11371, 12443, 16080, 18091, 18092, 20720, 55672

Example:

$ aquatone-scan --domain example.com --ports large

Tuning Like aquatone-discover, you can make the scanning more or less aggressive with the --threads option which accepts a number of threads for concurrent port scans. The default number of threads is 5.

$ aquatone-scan --domain example.com --threads 25

As aquatone-scan is performing port scanning, it can obviously be picked up by intrusion detection systems. While it will attempt to lessen the risk of detection by randomising hosts and ports, you can tune the stealthiness more with the --sleep and --jitter options which work just like the similarly named options for aquatone-discover. Keep in mind that setting the --sleep option will force the number of threads to one.

Results When aquatone-scan is finished, it will create a urls.txt file in the ~/aquatone/ directory, so for a scan of example.com it would be located at ~/aquatone/example.com/urls.txt. The format will be a list of URLs, for example:

http://example.com/
https://example.com/
http://www.example.com/
https://www.example.com/
http://secret.example.com:8001/
https://secret.example.com:8443/
http://cdn.example.com/
https://cdn.example.com/

... This file can be loaded into other tools such as EyeWitness. aquatone-scan will also generate a open_ports.txt file, which is a comma-separated list of hosts and their open ports, for example:

93.184.216.34,80,443
93.184.216.34,80
93.184.216.36,80,443,8443
192.0.2.42,80,8080

... See aquatone-scan --help for more options.

Gathering The final stage is the gathering part where the results of the discovery and scanning stages are used to query the discovered web services in order to retrieve and save HTTP response headers and HTML bodies, as well as taking screenshots of how the web pages look like in a web browser to make analysis easier. The screenshotting is done with the Nightmare.js Node.jslibrary. This library will be installed automatically if it's not present in the system.

$ aquatone-gather --domain example.com

aquatone-gather will look for hosts.json and open_ports.txt in the given domain's AQUATONE assessment directory and request and screenshot every IP address for each domain name for maximum coverage.

Tuning Like aquatone-discover and aquatone-scan, you can make the gathering more or less aggressive with the --threads option which accepts a number of threads for concurrent requests. The default number of threads is 5.

$ aquatone-gather --domain example.com --threads 25

As aquatone-gather is interacting with web services, it can be picked up by intrusion detection systems. While it will attempt to lessen the risk of detection by randomising hosts and ports, you can tune the stealthiness more with the --sleep and --jitter options which work just like the similarly named options for aquatone-discover. Keep in mind that setting the --sleep option will force the number of threads to one.

Results When aquatone-gather is finished, it will have created several directories in the domain's AQUATONE assessment directory:

• headers/: Contains text files with HTTP response headers from each web page
• html/: Contains text files with HTML response bodies from each web page
• screenshots/: Contains PNG images of how each web page looks like in a browser
• report/ Contains report files in HTML displaying the gathered information for easy analysis

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