List,
I'm currently working on (the much needed) error handling
"feature" for w3af [0], the user story says:
"""
I would like to have better handling for the case in which:
* My network connection died for a couple of seconds
* The server went offline for a couple of seconds
Currently w3af doesn't support this and will return an error, as a
user I would like w3af to auto-pause testing for some seconds and
auto-resume. This auto-pause feature should enable itself at most
three times in a row, if the server is still down w3af should return
an error.
"""
Now that I have to code it, I'm wondering... what's the best
strategy for doing this? My initial ideas are:
Assumptions
-----------------
Define fail as connection timeout, connection reset, host not
reachable, etc. (most socket errors)
Naive strategy
-------------------
* Define a MAX_CONSECUTIVE_ERRORS constant. If we reach it, stop the
whole scan.
* When one of the HTTP requests fails, delay all the following ones
for a couple of seconds
* If the next requests succeed, just continue as if nothing happen
* If they failed, keep delaying for a couple of seconds until we
recover OR reach MAX_CONSECUTIVE_ERRORS limit and stop the scan
% of MAX_CONSECUTIVE_ERRORS
---------------------------------------------------
* Define a MAX_CONSECUTIVE_ERRORS constant. If we reach it, stop the
whole scan.
* When one HTTP request fails, increase a counter (Only increase it
if the previous one also failed)
* When we reach 30% of MAX_CONSECUTIVE_ERRORS we delay all the
following HTTP requests hoping that the server/connection will recover
* If MAX_CONSECUTIVE_ERRORS is reached, then stop the scan
Anyone knows if there are papers on error network error handling
for cases like this? What's the best algorithm?
[0] https://github.com/andresriancho/w3af/issues/4811
Regards,
--
Andrés Riancho
Project Leader at w3af - http://w3af.org/
Web Application Attack and Audit Framework
Twitter: @w3af
GPG: 0x93C344F3
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