Category Archives: Uncategorized

Redesigning Dradis: A Fresh Look for a Better Navigation and Consistency

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Dradis has been a trusted tool in the pentesting world for over 15 years. Many changes, features, and components have been added during that period, all with a single goal: 

Offer the best possible product to our users.

However, as the platform evolved, the growing number of links and navigation layers made the layout feel more complex than we’d like. That’s why we’ve decided it’s time for a refresh.

Enter Hera

Pronounced /ˈhɪərə/, Hera Agathon is a character in the Battlestar Galactica universe. She was the first human-Cylon hybrid to exist, also known as “Shape of things to come” before her birth. Hera symbolizes a new era, the future, a way of moving forward, making it the perfect name for Dradis’ new updated layout!

Our main goal with this: make Dradis easier to navigate, give it a fresh look, and ensure a unified layout that feels consistent and intuitive.

The New Navigation Architecture

Navigation should be effortless and intuitive. You shouldn’t have to dig through menus or search for the pages you need. Everything important should be visible and easily accessible. That’s why the navigation system was the first thing we looked into. The new architecture brings cohesion and structure, making it easier to focus on your tasks. That said, Dradis is a sophisticated, and powerful platform, and as Tesler’s Law reminds us:

“For any system there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced.”

So as it was impossible to narrow down everything into a single navigation bar, we split the main navigation system into two horizontal menus, and two fully collapsible sidebars; because we know you need the space!

  • Main navigation: everything you need to stay on top of your tasks. From projects, to tools, to settings, can be found in the main navigation bar. Can be accessed from all pages.
  • Secondary navigation: everything you need that is section-related. Whether you’re working on a project, or using a tool, you can find all the related links here. Available as needed!
  • Left sidebar: dedicated to Nodes, allowing you to easily navigate through them.
  • Right sidebar: secondary sidebar for all your, well, secondary content. Everything that you could additionally need, but not necessarily.
Main and Secondary navigation (project)
Main and Secondary navigation (Gateway)
Sidebars open
Sidebars closed

A Fresh, Modern Look

Goodbye Grey, Hello White

We’ve also given Dradis a visual refresh to match its improved functionality. The new design is clean, modern, and easy on the eyes. Dradis now has a single unified layout that allows you to effortlessly navigate through all its sections, without feeling like you’re using two different applications.

Dradis Pro: Project overview
Dradis Pro: Projects
Dradis CE: Upload
Dradis CE: Issue

What’s Next?

While the navigation and visual updates are exciting, we’re not stopping there!

We’re also focusing on streamlining the editing experience to reduce friction and make content editing faster and easier. We’re looking into your feedback to design workflows tailored to specific tasks, so you can complete your work more efficiently. And – we’re doing all that while focusing on continuously improving usability.

Dradis is continuously evolving to meet your needs, with a focus on functionality, consistency, and usability.

Whether you’re a pentester, a manager, or anyone using Dradis for that matter, these updates are designed to help you do your job faster and with less frustration.

We can’t wait for you to experience the new Dradis. Let us know what you think!

Top 10 tables – a custom Dradis script

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Imagine, you scan a few hundred hosts to create a summary report. You want to show data on ports and operating systems without giving the end user hundreds of pages of data. Enter the “Top 10” script!

Credit for this script idea goes to Chris from I.S. Partners. He reached out via the support inbox to see if we could create a “Top 10” script that would do the following:

  1. Create an array of all of the operating systems, ports/protocols, and services in the project
  2. Deduplicate the arrays and count the number of instances
  3. Narrow down the array to the top 10 based on the number of instances
  4. Update a Content Block in the project with a textile table based on each array

The script assumes that you have a Content Block with the Type field set to “Top10” with the following fields:

  • PortScanning
  • OSEnumeration
  • ServiceEnumeration

Head to our scripting repo and check out the “Top 10” script. To use it:

1. SCP the top10.rb file to your instance (e.g. to the /tmp folder)

2. In the browser, find the project ID of the project that you need to update. For example, if your project lives at /pro/projects/123 in the browser, the ID is 123.

3. Run the following in the command line as “dradispro”:
$ cd /opt/dradispro/dradispro/current/
$ RAILS_ENV=production bin/rails runner /tmp/top10.rb <project_id>

You’ll need to sub in your project ID (Step #2 above) for “<project_id>” above! Example:

$ RAILS_ENV=production bin/rails runner /tmp/top10.rb 123

When the script completes, you’ll see this output in the console:

Port Scanning table updated!
Service Enumeration table updated!
OS Enumeration table updated!

After running the script, you can refresh the Top 10 content block to see the updated tables:

Chris reported that with their largest Nessus file (125MB), the script was able to perform the calculations successfully in less than 30 seconds. We’re optimistic about a similar script’s performance with your projects.

This script will need to be adjusted to meet your individual team’s specific requirements and preferences. But, we think it’s a promising option for teams who prefer not to use VBA or want to create similar tables in their Word reports.

If you need any help customizing this script to meet your specific use case, please reach out to our support team. Or, if you have ideas for improvements, please fork the repo and post in our users forum.

Year in Review – a future Dradis feature

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How many Dradis projects did you create this year? How many Issues did you find? Which were the most commonly found Issues? What was the most common severity of the Issues that you found?

Credit for this script idea goes to Marc Ligthart. His teammate reached out via the support inbox to see if we could create a quick “Year in Review” script that would list out the following:

1. Count of Projects created this year
2. Total Critical/High/Medium/Low Issues (by Tag)
3. Top 10 most found Issues (by title)
4. Top 10 most found Critical/High/Medium Issues (by title)

Dradis year in review script output example
Example output from the year in review script

You can already head over to our scripting repo and check out the Year in Review script. To use it:

1. SCP the file you your instance (e.g. to the /tmp folder)

2. Run the following in the command line as “dradispro”:
$ cd /opt/dradispro/dradispro/current/
$ RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails runner /tmp/year_in_review.rb

The output will list out the yearly review for all of the projects present on your Dradis instance.

Now, for the fun part? We want your feedback. If you like this idea, you’ll like version 2.0 even better. We want to include this functionality as part of the existing Business Intelligence Dashboard within Dradis. But first, we want to hear from you. What else would you like to see in a summary view like this in the BI Dashboard? What other metrics would be helpful for your team or what isn’t particularly useful about the current output? Please email our support team directly with feedback! We’re excited to continue working with you in 2020 and get you some more valuable insights into your Dradis usage along the way.

Windows cannot find ‘blunder’ error on Dradis 2.7.1

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Update May/26: An updated installer has been published that fixes the issue described below and is available through the download page.

The Dradis 2.7.1 Windows package (dradis-v2.7.1-setup.exe) that we released yesterday contains a typo in in one of the batch files: server.bat.

If you try to run the file directly or through the Start menu start server icon, you will get an error message:

Windows cannot find ‘blundler’. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button, and then click Search.

In order to fix this open the file in an editor (go to the Start menu icon, right click > Edit) and adjust it to:


@echo off

::If the script doesn't work, uncomment and adjust the following:
set PATH=c:\Ruby187\bin;%PATH%
set RAILS_ENV=production
set BASE=%~dp0
cd %BASE%\server\

start "Dradis Framework Server (Ctrl+C to terminate)" bundle exec rails server webrick

Thanks to Doug Ipperciel for bringing this to our attention.

5 comments:

  1. Unknown said,its not working on my windows 8 version
    ON 16 DECEMBER 2012 AT 15:38
  2. Unknown said,my message says

    bundle
    windows cannot find ‘bundle’.Make sure you typed the name correctly and then try againON 16 DECEMBER 2012 AT 15:41
  3. Unknown said,hey got it to work thanks my bad i install it on xp very simple then 7 then 8 pretty goodON 16 DECEMBER 2012 AT 17:20
  4. Anonymous said,not working on v 2.9 yetON 26 SEPTEMBER 2015 AT 04:36
  5. Unknown said,It works. Thank you for sharing. If you have problems with dll files, look there http://fix4dll.com/mfc110u_dll. I had a problem with it, do not run the program’s. After fixes dll files, everything worked. Good luck.ON 2 JUNE 2016 AT 15:40

Dradis 2.7.1 released!

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This bug-fixing release features:

  • Several closed issues: #3, #4, #6, #7, #8 and #10.
  • A cleaner, leaner note editor:

And all the goodness introduced in 2.7.0:

  • Improved command line API with Thor (thor -T to view all commands)
  • New Configuration Manager to handle all plugin config settings
  • New Upload Manager that runs uploads in the background and updates the interface through Ajax
  • New plugins:
  • Updated plugins:
    • Nessus plugin supports .nessus v2
    • Vuln::DB import updated to support the latest release
  • Bugs fixed: #2888332, #2973256
  • Update Rails to 3.0.6

download now

Upgrading from Dradis 2.7.0 to 2.7.1

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This week we are releasing Dradis Framework 2.7.1 which closes several bugs and brings a new note editor.

If you’re new to Dradis or upgrading from an older (2.6.x, 2.5.x…) release, go ahead and download the full package from the downloads page.

However, if you already have a working install of Dradis 2.7.0 maybe you don’t want to run the Windows installer again, or wait until your distro prepares an updated version of the package (did you know that BackTrack 5 shipped with Dradis 2.7.0?). Here is how to get the latest 2.7.1 code up and running.

Go to your install location:

In Windows:

c:\> cd %APPDATA%\dradis-2.7


In BackTrack:

# cd /pentest/misc/dradis


Backup the old server folder:

# mv server 2.7.0-server


Now you have a decision to make: upgrade to 2.7.1 or clone the Dradis repository so you can upgrade to 2.7.1 but also to any forthcoming releases (recommended)

Upgrading to 2.7.1

Download and uncompress the tarball for Dradis server 2.7.1 from GitHub:

https://github.com/dradis/dradisframework/tarball/REL-2.7.1

Uncompress in the drads-2.7 folder renaming the extracted directory to just server.

Using git repository for easy upgrading

From the current folder, clone Dradis git repository and point it to the latest release:


# git clone https://github.com/dradis/dradisframework.git server
# cd server
# git checkout -b REL-2.7.1 REL-2.7.1
# cd ..

Reset the environment and run the server


# ./reset.sh
# ./start.sh

If everything goes according to plan, you can now access Dradis on https://localhost:3004/ and in the top-right corner the version number will be 2.7.1.

Running Dradis Framework (2.7) in BackTrack4 R2

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Following the series of articles on how to get the Dradis Framework running in different operating system, this time is the turn of BackTrack 4 R2.

Note this is almost a re-post of my Running Dradis Framework in BackTrack 4 R2 but updated to 2.7 (instead of 2.6.1).



First, get a download link for the latest Dradis from http://dradisframework.org/downloads.html and get it:

# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/dradis/dradis-v2.7.0.tar.bz2

Extract it:

# tar -xvvjf dradis-v2.7.0.tar.bz2


Next we need to update the version of RubyGems installed in BT4:

# gem -v
1.3.1
# gem update --system
[...]
# gem -v
1.7.2


And install the Bundler gem:

# gem install bundler


There is only one missing prerequisite to ensure everything runs smoothly, the development bindings of the libxslt package. You can get them with:


# apt-get install libxslt-dev


Now we are ready to get things going:

# cd dradis-2.7

# ./reset.sh
Your Gemfile's dependencies could not be satisfied
Install missing gems with `bundle install`
Some Ruby gems are missing, do you want to install them now? [y] y

Ok then, I am going to run bundle install for you, then you should run this script again.

Fetching source index for http://rubygems.org/
Installing rake (0.8.7)
Installing RedCloth (4.2.5) with native extensions
Installing abstract (1.0.0)
[...]
Your bundle is complete! Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.


After all the dependencies are installed, we are ready to initialize the database and start the server. However, there is just one thing that have to be changed in the startup scripts.

Edit the last line of reset.sh to look like this:

bundle exec thor dradis:reset

Now we are ready, run the reset script again to generate the database:

# ./reset.sh

And start the server with:

# ./start.sh

Everything should be up and running in: https://127.0.0.1:3004/