Many new applications are emerging out in the market on one-side and new security threats emerging on the other side. Earlier, product owners were not serious about their application security and they did not give much importance to security testing, since hackers were few in existence. However, now-a-days a large number of people have started hacking for fun, money and popularity. They either gain access to confidential information or inject malicious code to crash the system. Now, product owners have begun to understand the importance and criticality of application security and they want their products to be secure.
Testing the application’s security manually is possible but becomes a mammoth task. Well, the right tools should help a tester progress with detecting the security threats in the application. That leads us to the question: “What’s the mantra/right tool for detecting your security threats?” Well, the answer lies in the question itself. It’s the ‘MANTRA” browser. Mantra is an excellent browser-based framework for security testing.
I would like to walk you through the features that are available with MANTRA and how it helps many professionals in our industry.
What is Mantra?
Mantra is a free and open source security framework with tools/add-ons bundled in a single browser. Mainly, it focuses on security threats. It can be used by both ethical hackers (penetration testers) who legitimately scan the product to uncover the security vulnerabilities and Black hat hackers who exploit the system’s security.
Features of Mantra
- It supports cross-platform, so you can run the Mantra browser on different operating systems like Windows, Linux and MAC
- It is portable – you can carry this tool in flash drive, memory cards, etc.
More than a browser, it’s a toolkit for security testing. A quick glance at the main utilities available with Mantra toolkit for security testing:
Other add-ons available in Mantra toolkit:
- Firebug, HTTP Fox, JS View helps web developers in debugging the script
- Live HTTP Header, HTTP Requester, Modify headers, etc., help in viewing the header information of the web page
- Poster, REST Client, SOA Client help to view/inspect web services
- Other network related add-ons like FireFTP, FireSSH and SQLite Manager are also available
With Mantra browser,
- Security testing has become child’s play for penetration testers
- Debugging CSS, HTML, and Java scripts is a fun-to-do task for web application developers
- Monitoring and analyzing HTTP traffic is now a lot more easier for the network administrator
As you can see, it’s a complete hands-on toolkit for web developers, security professionals and penetration testers (hackers, too 
) alike. So, what are you waiting for? Use the Mantra browser and make security testing an everyday-viable possibility!
There’s more to come in vivid detail, in my later posts, about each of the utilities available with Mantra browser.
Until then, “Happy Mantra-ing!!”
