In the dynamic cloud environment, proactive penetration testing, or “pen testing”, is crucial for organizations to significantly strengthen the security posture of their cloud-based software, mitigating risks and ensuring resilience. It involves simulated attacks to find vulnerabilities in systems, applications, and networks. Powered by OpenAI’s advanced language models, ChatGPT is designed to understand and generate natural language text and can actually assist penetration testers.
In this blog, we explore in-depth the application of ChatGPT and other Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), how they can support pen testers, and how to balance benefits versus risks.
Applications of ChatGPT in Pentesting
1. Reconnaissance and Information Gathering
Reconnaissance marks the first phase in penetration testing, focused on information gathering about the target. ChatGPT can facilitate this in the following ways:
- It can suggest techniques, methods, and tools to gather data on open ports, services, IP addresses, and subdomains, including tools like Shodan or Censys.
- It can help process raw data from sources like OSINT feeds, DNS information, and WHOIS lookups, reformatting it into structured, easily analyzable data.
2. Script and Payloads Generation
Writing code and scripts is often essential in pen testing, particularly for customising attacks. ChatGPT can be especially useful for:
- Generating Scripts: It can create scripts for tasks like SSH brute-forcing, port scanning, or various types of injections.
- Adapting Code: ChatGPT can adapt existing code to different contexts, saving time when modifying open-source scripts to fit specific requirements.
3. Vulnerability Identification and Analysis
ChatGPT can be used to support vulnerability analysis in the following ways:
- Understanding Known Vulnerabilities: ChatGPT can provide an overview of a CVE, detailing the vulnerability’s affected systems, potential impacts, and typical exploitation techniques.
- Misconfiguration Checks: These can suggest common misconfigurations in systems, applications, and networks that could be exploited, aiding pen testers in developing a testing checklist.
- Creating Exploitation Code: While ChatGPT has protections against generating harmful code, it can still offer a framework or pseudo-code to help pen testers design safe proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits.
4. Documentation and Reporting
Documenting and reporting are crucial yet often tedious tasks in pen testing. ChatGPT can simplify these by generating:
- Report Summaries: ChatGPT can help summarize findings, organize vulnerabilities by severity, and create an easy-to-understand report for non-technical stakeholders.
- Standardized Documentation: ChatGPT can create templates for test plans, checklists, and standard operating procedures, reducing time spent on repetitive tasks.
5. Educational and Knowledge Support
Penetration testers often work with a wide range of tools and technologies, and ChatGPT can serve as a valuable learning companion:
- Explaining Security Concepts: ChatGPT can simplify security terms, techniques, and tools, helping junior pentesters understand the basics.
- Providing Resources: Suggest resources like articles, books, and courses for deeper knowledge in the field of cyber security.
- Certifications: For career advancement, ChatGPT can create practice questions and certification exam scenarios for pentesters, suggest best certifications and path for the respective domains.
Enhancing Security Testing with GPTs
Use of GPT models assists pen testers in the following ways:
- Leveraging ChatGPT’s generative model, it is possible to achieve a significant reduction in time and effort compared to traditional manual security testing enhancing efficiency without compromising accuracy.
- Creating one-liners for repetitive or time-consuming tasks allows pen testers to focus on in-depth analysis rather than routine checks, speeding up the testing process.
- The basis of application behaviour, GPT can help with test case scenarios, attack vector analysis, customised payloads and report creation.
- They can provide a robust toolkit of resources, from specialized tools and exploit kits to GitHub repositories, comparing different pentest articles and trends, ensuring streamlined and effective remediation.
- GPTs help to create relevant checklists, adhere to best practices and stay updated with the latest vulnerability information.
In addition to ChatGPT, the following GPTs can be used to enhance security testing.
Kali GPT is an AI assistant designed to help users master Kali Linux and offensive security. It provides interactive learning, real-time troubleshooting, and insights into cybersecurity tools with command examples with detailed descriptions, guiding users in penetration testing, network security, and ethical hacking.
Use Cases:
- KaliGPT can provide a list of blogs, articles, and whitepapers regarding the vulnerabilities and it can summarize the information showcased for ease of understanding for the user.
- Creating Payloads to Bypass Injections: KaliGPT predicts bypasses for various injection vulnerabilities like XSS, HTMLi, CMDi, SQLi, and more, offering detailed descriptions.
- Generate PDF or DOC templates for SQL injection bug reports, including impact, remediation, mitigation, and description.
- KaliGPT can help to provide different methods/test case scenarios to test vulnerabilities of Web, API, Mobile, Network Pentesting etc.
ReconGPT is a specialized AI assistant designed to help penetration testers, bug hunters, and cybersecurity researchers by providing in-depth knowledge and support on reconnaissance techniques, tools, and methodologies.
Use cases:
- ReconGPT provides commands for any open-source tool to use as a test case in the Recon phase of testing any application.
- Recon GPT can be utilized to generate one-liners for enhancing penetration testing tasks, allowing testers to concentrate more on the actual testing rather than manually creating each one-liner.
HackTricksGPT, leveraging the HackTricks library, offers insights on security vulnerabilities, pen testing techniques, digital forensics, and more. Designed for ethical hackers and cybersecurity professionals, it assists in identifying, analyzing, and addressing security risks while emphasizing best practices in cybersecurity.
Use cases:
- Hacktricks GPT can help provide the latest methodologies on various security best practices, vulnerability standards and checklists for pen testing.
- Provides essential resources like specialized tools, PoC exploits, and GitHub repositories. Identify technical blogs, research papers, and documentation on specific CVEs and industry best practices for remediation.
- With the help of GPT we can get the latest CVEs and detailed information. We can also use it to keep our checklists updated with the latest trends, methodologies, exploits, and bypasses.
Balancing Benefits and Risks of ChatGPT in Pentesting
While ChatGPT has advantages, we should also be mindful of its risks.
1. Malicious Code
As a professional using ChatGPT for coding, remain cautious of the potentially harmful outputs. To stay safe, always review the generated code to ensure it doesn’t include dangerous functions or cause any harm to the application.
2. GPT as Assistance
Leverage ChatGPT for generating ideas, explaining concepts, or drafting scripts but always rely on our expertise for testing and validations.
3. Privacy concerns
ChatGPT processes data on servers, raising privacy concerns about access and usage. To ensure security, in day-to-day practice focus on using generic examples rather than including any sensitive or application-specific information.
