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Difference between revisions of "Review Webserver Metafiles for Information Leakage (OTG-INFO-003)"
(Added "(ISC)2 Blog: The Attack of the Spiders from the Clouds" Reference) |
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== Description of the Issue == | == Description of the Issue == | ||
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| − | Web spiders/robots/crawlers retrieve a web page and then recursively traverse hyperlinks to retrieve further web content. Their accepted behavior is specified by the ''Robots Exclusion Protocol'' of the robots.txt file in the web root directory. | + | Web spiders/robots/crawlers retrieve a web page and then recursively traverse hyperlinks to retrieve further web content. Their accepted behavior is specified by the ''Robots Exclusion Protocol'' of the robots.txt file in the web root directory [1]. |
| − | Web spiders/robots/crawlers can intentionally ignore the | + | Within the robots.txt file, ''User-Agent:'' refers to the specific web spider/robot/crawler i.e. ''User-Agent: Google'' refers to the ''GoogleBot'' while ''User-Agent: *'' applies to all web spiders/robots/crawlers. |
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| + | The ''Disallow:'' statement within the robots.txt file specifies where the web spiders/robots/crawlers should *not* to recursively retrieve web pages e.g. ''Disallow: /cgi-bin/'' refers to the ''/cgi-bin'' directory and sub-directories. | ||
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| + | Web spiders/robots/crawlers can intentionally ignore the ''Disallow:'' statement[s] of the robots.txt file [2]. Hence, robots.txt should not be considered to control access to web content not intended to be stored or published by external parties. | ||
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Revision as of 03:45, 17 August 2008
OWASP Testing Guide v3 Table of Contents
This article is part of the OWASP Testing Guide v3. The entire OWASP Testing Guide v3 can be downloaded here.
OWASP at the moment is working at the OWASP Testing Guide v4: you can browse the Guide here
This is a draft of a section of the new Testing Guide v3
Brief Summary
This section describes how to test the robots.txt file.
Description of the Issue
Web spiders/robots/crawlers retrieve a web page and then recursively traverse hyperlinks to retrieve further web content. Their accepted behavior is specified by the Robots Exclusion Protocol of the robots.txt file in the web root directory [1].
Within the robots.txt file, User-Agent: refers to the specific web spider/robot/crawler i.e. User-Agent: Google refers to the GoogleBot while User-Agent: * applies to all web spiders/robots/crawlers.
The Disallow: statement within the robots.txt file specifies where the web spiders/robots/crawlers should *not* to recursively retrieve web pages e.g. Disallow: /cgi-bin/ refers to the /cgi-bin directory and sub-directories.
Web spiders/robots/crawlers can intentionally ignore the Disallow: statement[s] of the robots.txt file [2]. Hence, robots.txt should not be considered to control access to web content not intended to be stored or published by external parties.
Black Box testing and example
The robots.txt file is retrieved by from the web root directory of the web server. For example, the URL "http://www.google.com/robots.txt" is the robots.txt file for www.google.com
Google provide an "Analyze robots.txt" function as part of its "Google Webmaster Tools" which can assist with testing.
Gray Box testing and example
The process is the same as Black Box testing above.
References
Whitepapers
- [1] "The Web Robots Pages" - http://www.robotstxt.org/
- [2] "How Google crawls my site" - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8843
- [3] "(ISC)2 Blog: The Attack of the Spiders from the Clouds" - http://blog.isc2.org/isc2_blog/2008/07/the-attack-of-t.html
- [4] "How do I check that my robots.txt file is working as expected?" - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35237
