Cyber Risks · PortSwigger Research

Keep it simple, Scanner

Summary: PortSwigger researcher Tom Shelton-Lefley describes removing the merge behavior from Burp Scanner's crawler, a graph homomorphism problem he calls NP-hard that collapsed redundant subgraphs but made the code hard to read and maintain. The removal was justified by crawl statistics showing 96% of crawls over the last year had zero merges and 99% had five or fewer.

What you should know: The crawler's internal graph is now exposed in a crawl paths view, so behavior that was previously hidden complexity has to be predictable for users - and the team's stated test for keeping any crawler function is whether it sparks joy for developers, users, or performance.

Read the original at PortSwigger Research ↗

Topics
Vulnerabilities & Patching
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