This weekend as i have nothing better to do, lemme talk about my experiences with proxy tools:
- Proxy Tool: Parameter Manipulation is a very important stage of web app testing, and without this, the test will be incomplete. I was using tools like Paros and Achillies for achieveing this, but the problem with both of them was they were highly unstable and would crash every now and then. Thus if the customer has asked you to provide all the logs of testing, it would be difficult for you to provide logs if tools were to crash. I currently use Burp Suite. I find it is highly stable and comes with this feature of viewing request/response as text, parameter, and as hex. Viewing request and response as 'param' helps me particulary when dealing with asp .net applications becuase of the long value of viewstate and other .net stuff. Another interesting feature of Burp is the repeater module, which could be used to send modified requests to server multiple times. I use this feature mostly to figure out the 'non essential' parameters of the unmodified request and then to focus on the essential parametes. Best way to learn the capabilities of this tool is to download it and then play with it. :)