Here’s a clear breakdown of what Skipfish is and how it works:

🛡️ What Is Skipfish?

Skipfish is a high-performance web application security scanner developed by Google. It’s designed to help security professionals and developers identify vulnerabilities in websites and web applications through automated scanning.

🔍 Key Features

• Active reconnaissance: It performs a deep crawl of the target site using dictionary-based probes.
• Fast scanning engine: Capable of sending thousands of requests per second.
• Heuristic vulnerability detection: Identifies issues like XSS, SQL injection, SSL flaws, and more.
• Interactive HTML reports: Generates detailed, easy-to-read reports for analysis.
• Custom dictionary support: Allows targeted fuzzing based on specific site structures.
• Authentication support: Can handle login forms and HTTP authentication.

🧪 How It Works

Skipfish operates in several stages:

1. Crawling: It recursively explores the site to build a sitemap.
2. Probing: Uses a dictionary of payloads to test for vulnerabilities.
3. Scanning: Performs active security checks that are designed to be non-disruptive.
4. Reporting: Outputs results in HTML format for easy review.

🛠️ Example Usage

To scan a site:

skipfish -o output_directory  http://example.com 

• -o specifies where to save the report.
• You can add options like -W for a custom dictionary or -A for authentication credentials.

🧰 Installation

On Kali Linux, you can install it via:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install skipfish

Or clone it manually from GitHub:

git clone  https://github.com/spinkham/skipfish.git 
cd skipfish
make

🎯 Use Cases

• Penetration testing
• Bug bounty hunting
• Security audits for CMS platforms like WordPress or Joomla
• Reconnaissance in ethical hacking campaigns