Decoding and Tampering Protobuf Serialized Messages in Burp
If you’ve ever assessed or poked at an application that uses Google
Protocol Buffers, you know how painstaking the whole process can be. When
you’re lucky enough to have a corresponding .proto, crafting messages
via generated API’s is tedious. When you don’t, you have to resort to
reversing the protocol format by hand and/or extracting the proto file
descriptor out of the application. Otherwise, you’re left dumb-fuzzing the
protocol and never diving into the application itself.
Out of necessity, I wrote a Burp Extension that would decode raw protobuf
messages even when a .proto was not available. After loading a .proto, the
extension features the ability to modify and tamper with protobuf messages.
In my extension, you can also manually specify what message type to
deserialize a given protobuf message as. You can download my extension at
The following set of screenshots should give you a quick overview of what
it’s capable of:
We start off with a view of what a simple, raw protobuf message looks like
in Burp. If you’ve ever tried to tamper this right here, you’d probably
find yourself reading and re-reading protocol buffer encoding.
Here’s what that message looks like when decoded using protoc --decode_raw:
Another request that looks to be adding a serialized user object. Note,
the burp-protobuf-decoder extension identifies protobuf messages by an HTTP
Content-Type request or response header equal to application/x-protobuf .
If the application you’re looking at does things a bit differently, have
a look at modifying isEnabled() , getMessage() and
setMessage() of protoburp.py.
And again, what it looks like after protoc --decode_raw:
If we’re lucky enough to have a .proto that defines what this message looks
like, we can load it from here:
Find our addressbook.proto (taken from the protobuf example applications):
We can then manually deserialize the message as a Person. Next time a
request comes through, the extension will automatically deserialize the
message. Note, an attempt will be made to deserialize as all types until one
is found to deserialize with all required fields initialized (this could
result in some false positives).
That looks much better…
But wait, how about we tamper it?
The extension will reserialize our message and we can send it on its way. If
any errors occur (such as required fields missing), an alert dialog will pop
up letting you know.
And the response from the server confirms our message was tampered succesfully.
Hopefully my extension will make testing protobuf based applications much
easier from now on.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from tssci-security authored by Marcin Wielgoszewski. Read the original post at: http://www.tssci-security.com/archives/2013/05/30/decoding-and-tampering-protobuf-serialized-messages-in-burp
