Cyber Risks · PortSwigger Research

Bypassing WAFs and cracking XOR with Hackvertor

Summary: PortSwigger researcher Gareth Heyes described Hackvertor, a Burp Suite extension that applies nested tag-based encoding and decoding inside Repeater, Intruder and optionally Proxy requests, and demonstrated using its throw_eval XSS tag to bypass the Cloudflare WAF on a test URL. Heyes also added an auto decoder that brute-forces rot encodings across 25 shifts and scores results against English quadgram frequencies, plus a repeating-XOR cracker that guesses key length up to 30 characters using index of coincidence and frequency analysis.

What's compelling: A free extension that automates multi-layer decoding and repeating-XOR cracking lowers the effort needed to spot weak obfuscation, and the same tag mechanism was shown defeating a Cloudflare WAF in a single Repeater request.

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Topics
Vulnerabilities & Patching
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