VAmPI - The Vulnerable API

The Vulnerable API (Based on OpenAPI 3)

VAmPI is a vulnerable API made with Flask and it includes vulnerabilities from the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities for APIs. It was created as I wanted a vulnerable API to evaluate the efficiency of tools used to detect security issues in APIs. It includes a switch on/off to allow the API to be vulnerable or not while testing. This allows to cover better the cases for false positives/negatives. VAmPI can also be used for learning/teaching purposes. You can find a bit more details about the vulnerabilities in erev0s.com.

Features

• Based on OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities for APIs.
• OpenAPI3 specs and Postman Collection included.
• Global switch on/off to have a vulnerable environment or not.
• Token-Based Authentication (Adjust lifetime from within app.py)

VAmPI’s flow of actions is going like this: an unregistered user can see minimal information about the dummy users included in the API. A user can register and then login to be allowed using the token received during login to post a book. For a book posted the data accepted are the title and a secret about that book. Each book is unique for every user and only the owner of the book should be allowed to view the secret.

A quick rundown of the actions included can be seen in the following table:

For more details you can use a service like the swagger editor supplying it the OpenAPI specification which can be found in the directory openapi_specs.

List of Vulnerabilities

• SQLi Injection
• Unauthorized Password Change
• Broken Object Level Authorization
• Mass Assignment
• Excessive Data Exposure through debug endpoint
• User and Password Enumeration
• RegexDOS (Denial of Service)
• Lack of Resources & Rate Limiting

Run it

It is a Flask application so in order to run it you can install all requirements and then run the app.py. To install all requirements simply run pip3 install -r requirements.txt and then python3 app.py.

Or if you prefer you can also run it through docker or docker compose.

Run it through Docker

Build with

docker build -t vampi_docker:latest .

and Run (remove the -d if you want to see the output in your terminal)

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 vampi_docker:latest

[Note: if you run Docker on newer versions of the MacOS, use -p 5001:5000 to avoid conflicting with the AirPlay Receiver service. Alternatively, you could disable the AirPlay Receiver service in your System Preferences -> Sharing settings.]

Run it through Docker Compose

Assuming you’ve built the container per the above steps, run one instance securely (port 5001) and another insecurely (port 5002):

docker compose up -d

Customizing token timeout and vulnerable environment or not

If you would like to alter the timeout of the token created after login or if you want to change the environment not to be vulnerable then you can use a few ways depending how you run the application.

• If you run it like normal with python3 app.py then all you have to do is edit the alive and vuln variables defined in the app.py itself. The alive variable is measured in seconds, so if you put 100, then the token expires after 100 seconds. The vuln variable is like boolean, if you set it to 1 then the application is vulnerable, and if you set it to 0 the application is not vulnerable.
• If you run it through Docker, then you must either pass environment variables to the docker run command or edit the Dockerfile and rebuild.
  • Docker run example: docker run -d -e vulnerable=0 -e tokentimetolive=300 -p 5000:5000 vampire_docker:latest
    • One nice feature to running it this way is you can startup a 2nd container with vulnerable=1 on a different port and flip easily between the two.
  • In the Dockerfile you will find two environment variables being set, the ENV vulnerable=1 and the ENV tokentimetolive=60. Feel free to change it before running the docker build command.