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Java serde

A Burp extension and CLI to encode and decode Java Object Stream into a JSON representation.

See also

Guide

Usage

The Jar file can be used as a Burp extension, in which case a new tab appear on requests and responses having the Content-Type set to application/x-java-serialized-object. While using the extension it might be interesting to keep an eye on the logs. It's not easy to transmit information about what happens to the user. So we're logging inconsistencies and errors there. If you see an empty tab it often means an error during decoding.

The application can also be used in the terminal it can either convert a Java Object Stream to JSON (decoding) or the other way around (encoding).

$ java -jar ./java-serde.jar decode < ./mystream.bin
{
  ...
}

$ java -jar ./java-serde.jar encode < ./mystream.json
[...BINARY STREAM...]

Testing

When writing a new unit test, a Java file must be created to generate the stream. This ensures we can tweak the content easily in the future. The target all in the Makefile is used to generate the stream binary files. This is an easy way to ensure that they each corresponds to their Java generator file.

The last thing to do is to write the JSON file, in some case we can directly take its content from the test's error message.

When everything is ready we can run the tests using Gradle.

Known limitations

  • To use a reference, the object must be declared before in the stream.
  • TC_PROXYCLASSDESC Is not implemented and could require a lot of work.
  • TC_RESET Is not implemented but should be easy to do.
  • TC_EXCEPTION Is not implemented and requires TC_RESET.
  • For convenience, there are no string reference in the JSON document. This means that the re-encoding might differ if the same string is written multiple times without reference. This is the case for example if you write two new String of the same string in a stream.

Improvements

  • Object of known type (such as Date, etc.) could be represented in a primitive form. The hard part may be with classes inheriting them.
  • Toggleable representation. If we decide to implement the custom representation for known types or string reference we should be able to toggle if it's a behavior we want or not.