Running ZAP Attack Proxy on Jenkins –

This tutorial will explain how easy you implement ZAP Attack Proxy into Jenkins. Therefor we create a Freestyle job and will use the “Official OWASP ZAP Jenkins Plugin“. That you can follow and reproduce the tutorial, you need a running Jenkins instance with SSH access to it and proper system rights (OS, Jenkins).

Install ZAP Attack Proxy

Following steps needs to be done when SSH connection, to Jenkins, is established.

# download installer script
$ wget https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy/releases/download/v2.8.0/ZAP_2_8_0_unix.sh

# set chmod of script
$ chmod +x ZAP_2_8_0_unix.sh

# execute installer script
$ ./ZAP_2_8_0_unix.sh

# add environment variable (ZAPROXY_HOME)
$ echo "ZAPROXY_HOME=/usr/local/bin/" >> /etc/environment

# restart Jenkins
$ systemctl restart jenkins

Note: If you don’t restart Jenkins after creating “ZAPROXY_HOME”, you will run into trouble like “java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: ZAP INSTALLATION DIRECTORY IS MISSING, PROVIDED [ null ]”

Install needed Jenkins PlugIn’s

Search for “OWAS ZAP” and for “HTML Publisher” plugins.

Jenkins Plugin OWASP ZAP — Official OWASP ZAP

Jenkins Plugin HTML Publisher — HTML Publisher

Configure Jenkins Freestyle job

All what we need is there, we can start to setup a Jenkins “Freestyle project” with the name “ZAPAttackProxy”.

Create new Jenkins Freestyle Project — Jenkins Freestyle Project

The next setting is optional… I recommend to find your own value (I go with 5 for that example).

Discard old builds — Max # of builds to keep

On every build (Jenkins job run) the workspace should be clean. Please enable the checkbox.

We add now the build step. This build step is available because of the PlugIn “Official OWASP ZAP“.

Add build step Execute ZAP — Build step: Execute ZAP

Now we have many fields to configure. We start to set the values for section “Admin Configurations”.

ZAP Admin Configuration — Admin Configuration

As we already installed ZAP and created the entry into /etc/environment, we can now use that variable.

ZAP Installation Method — Installation Method

For ZAP Home Directory we add the path to the workspace and let the build create the directory “.ZAP”. For Session Management we choose “Persist Session” and give filename “my_session”.

ZAP Home Directory and Session Management — Home Directory & Session Management

Under section “Session Properties” you add the Context Name “default” and for “Include in Context” you can add IP’s and/or Domains. For that example I choose “http://scanme.nmap.org/*”.

ZAP Session Properties — Session Properties

In section “Attack Method” you can choose different attack methods like Spider Scan and so on. Please set always a “Starting Point”. The settings here are self explainable.

Enable checkbox “Generate Reports” in section “Finalize Run”. Now enter a filename and select “XML” and “HTML” format.

Note: You can ignore the HTTP 404 error.

We are done! To provide on our job dashboard a link for HTML report, you can use now the HTML Publisher.

ZAP Publish HTML reports — Publish HTML reports

Execute the job and play with “Attack Methods”…

– Softwaretester –

knowledge is power

Running ZAP Attack Proxy on Jenkins