dawn is a source code scanner designed to review your web applications for security issues.

The tool is able to scan web applications written in Ruby and it supports all major MVC (Model View Controller) frameworks, out of the box:

• Ruby on Rails
• Sinatra
• Padrino

dawn version 2.0 has 680+ security checks loaded in its knowledge base which is weekly updated from the National Vulnerability Database by NIST.

When you run dawn on your code it parses your project Gemfile.lock looking for the gems used and it tries to detect the ruby interpreter version you are using or you declared in your ruby version management tool you like most (RVM, rbenv, ...).

Then the tool tries to detect the MVC framework your web application uses and it applies the security check accordingly. There checks designed to match rails application or checks that are appliable to any ruby code.

dawn can also understand the code in your views and to backtrack sinks to spot cross site scripting and sql injections introduced by the code you actually wrote (in the project roadmap this is the code most of the future development effort will be focused on).

dawn security scan result is a list of vulnerabilities with some mitigation actions you want to follow in order to build a stronger web application.

You can install latest dawn version, fetching it from Rubygems by typing:

$ gem install dawnscanner

After that, you need to download the knowledge base from Github and unpack the archive to $HOME/dawnscanner/kb directory.

A typical kb directory layout is similar to this:

$ ll ~/dawnscanner/kb
total 56K
drwxr-xr-x 2 thesp0nge users  28K 29 mar 18.27 bulletin
drwxr-xr-x 2 thesp0nge users   72  7 lug  2021 generic_check
-rw-r--r-- 1 thesp0nge users   65 29 mar 17.06 kb.yaml
-rw-r--r-- 1 thesp0nge users   74 29 mar 17.06 kb.yaml.sig
drwxr-xr-x 2 thesp0nge users 4,0K  7 lug  2021 owasp_ror_cheatsheet

The knowledge base is structured this way:

• bulletin is the folder where all CVE downloaded from NIST are stored.
• generic_check is the folder with all custom checks for your code
• owasp_ror_cheatsheet is for the Owasp Ruby on Rails cheatsheet recomendations

Starting from version 2.0, the tool uses subcommands to start specific tasks, each of them with specific help messages.

The scan subcommand tells dawn to scan the specified target for security issues.

$ dawn scan target

At the moment results are available in text format only and they are stored in a directory named with the scan timestamp, under $HOME/dawnscanner/results/target, where target is the name of the application being analyzed.

Is it possible, with the kb subcommand, to query the knowledge base.