Paros Proxy – useful utility for web debugging

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see what data exactly do you submit with your HTML form with Post method? Well, you can and it’s easy with Paros Proxy tool !

As the name says, to simplify, this utility acts as your local web proxy. So, to set it up (after the installation) you configure your web browser’s proxy setting to something like http://localhost:xxxx (where “xxxx” is a Paros Proxy specific port). By doing that all traffic you make through your web browser goes through this utility.

This utility actually intercepts all “messages” (traffic packets) and can make a “pause” for you to see what request was made on a client side and is being sent to server.

Beside this capability, with this tool you can also change the request itself and send this changed request to the server. Can you see now how your web can easily be hacked if you’re not doing proper visitor’s input validation? As you figured out by now, besides the client-side validation you must do the server-side validation as well!

So as you can see, this tool is not just a great debuging tool, it is also a great web application security tool.

This application is free and can be found here – www.parosproxy.org