Nuclei

Notes from my practice but also from XSSrat course

Nuclei is an open source and community powered vulnerability scanner.

• Github repo

• Official Documentation

• Official blog

Installation

Nuclei requires the latest version of GO

The easy way

• sudo apt update

• sudo apt install nuclei

Or you can install Go first and then nuclei as follows as per the official documentation.

Official way

Install Go

• $ rm -rf /usr/local/go && tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.20.linux-amd64.tar.gz

• export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin (put this in $HOME/.profile or /etc/profile)

• More info here

• go env -w GOPATH=$HOME/go

• More info here

Install go with snapd

• sudo systemctl start snapd

• sudo snap install go --classic

Install Nuclei

• go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v2/cmd/nuclei@latest

Install with Brew

Install brew

• /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

• Add Homebrew to your PATH

  • (echo; echo 'eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)"') >> /home/gabrielle/.profile

  • eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

• Install gcc (recommended by brew)

  • brew install gcc

Install nuclei

• brew install nuclei

Run nuclei

• nuclei -u https://example.com/ (it can be an url or an host)

Cheat Sheet

• Update templates nuclei -ut

• Launch scan on 10.10.2.4 nuclei -v -t ssh-pass-auth.yaml 10.10.2.4

• Validate your template will work nuclei -t template.yaml -validate

• Launch a specific template against a target nuclei -v -t ssh-auth-methods.yaml -u <target-ip_or_file-with-target-list>

Nuclei Templates

• Github repo
• Official documentation

Anatomy of a template

• ID

• Metadata

  • Name author description tag

• Requests

  • Method

  • Path

  • Redirects:TRUE

  • MAX-REDIRECTS:3

Dynamic variables

• GE{{BASEURL}} Replaced on runtime with the input url (target file)

• {{ROOTURL}} Replaced on runtime by root url (target file)

• {{HOSTNAME}} Replaced on runtime by hostname including port of the target

• {{HOST}} Replaced on runtime in the request by host (target file)

• {{PORT}} Replaced on runtime by input port (target file)

• {{PATH}} Replaced on runtime by input path (target file)