Burp head-up display - toggle Burp proxy from anywhere and get its status

These scripts allow to display the current status for the Burp proxy (INTERCEPT or PASS) in the notification bar, and toggle it with a global keyboard shortcut even when the Burp window is not active.

I've created it for the i3 window manager and i3blocks, but the same codebase can be adapted to other GUI.

Installation

Prerequisites: Burp Community or Burp Pro, ready to handle Jython extension

1. Save this repo locally;
2. chmod u+x burpheadup.py
3. Edit both burpext_burpheadup.py and burpheadup.py, and set a common KEY. You can also change the port if you need;
4. In Burp, go to Extender > Extensions > Add, and select burpext_burpheadup.py;
5. In the i3blocks config file, set a new block with the following:

[burp]
command=/PATH/TO/burp-headup/burpheadup.py --get-status
signal=12

Edit the signal value if it is already used by i3blocks or another program, and change SIGNAL_NB in burpheadup.py.

6. In the i3 config file, set the following:

bindsym YOUR+SHORTCUT exec /PATH/TO/burp-headup/burpheadup.py --toggle

For instance, I set bindsym Mod4+a exec /foo/bar/burp-headup/burpheadup.py --toggle

6. Reload i3, and test your shortcut. If it seems to fail sometimes, see Calibration.

Caveats

If you toggle the proxy from the Burp interface, clicking the "Intercept is off" button like it's 1963, the displayed status will get desynchronized. It will update when you'll use your keyboard shortcut again.

Calibration

Yes, you heard right, this program might need calibration. See, the Burp Extender API offers a setProxyInterceptionEnabled(bool) function to enable/disable the proxy, but does not offer a way to get its current status. Too bad, because we need this piece of information to toggle the proxy.

The good news is that there is actually a way to guess it. The bad news is that it is hacky as hell.

Depending on the current state of the proxy (enabled/disabled), the setProxyInterceptionEnabled(bool) will take more or less time to execute. So we can just time it, and depending of its execution duration, determine its previous state.

I've added in this repo another Burp Extension, burpext_calibration.py, that you can use to get the right value for you. Install it in Burp, and take a look at the data in the Output tab. You want to choose a value greater than the Max of Same state durations, but lower that the Min of Changing state durations.

Here are the details for my computer, in seconds:

This can be summarized in

So in my case, I chose 0.01 second, that allows a good margin of error in case of an operation being suddenly quicker/slower.

License

Copyright (C) 2020 Romain RICARD [email protected]

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

See LICENSE.md for details.