Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Would someone create pyFox already?

In the reverse engineering world IDA Python changed how people do things. Instead of wasting an hour of "monkey" labor on a repetitive task you could now write a Python script one-liner, or even load a script.

You could change variable names everywhere at once (even in comments), and do much more complicated things if you put your mind to it.

Firefox allows for people to build plugins, which is very useful. Using these plugins you can control what web pages look like and even Firefox itself (configuration). You can change text, images and scripts, pick an object, change encoding or even sort through Cookies.

Why not combine the two ideas?

pyFox would let you run command-line Python scripts from within Firefox. You could choose and manipulate objects, change the web page, search it for regular expressions, make it all in CAPITAL LETTERS or filter it for vulnerabilities.

On the other end you could load a script to manipulate cookies for a different expiration date, download a web page every five minutes to compare for changes or even harvest Google for a keyword, explore recursively on-the-fly, and see what you find.

The sky is the limit, and Python is the tool.

People have been using the web for everything ("everything over HTTP") since the last century, and creating entire projects utilizing browsers and HTTP. Why not bring this experience (which by the way, has been a security nightmare) and POWER to the hands of the end user?

Some folks referred me to a plugin called Greasemonkey which allows some web page manipulation using Javascript. And...

Very recently Ubiquity was released, allowing SOME of the functionality, connecting the symbols, etc. but at a very early stage:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

So, any volunteers to create pyFox?

Update:
navtej shared the following URLs in a comment:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/008865.html
http://nufox.berlios.de/

Gadi Evron,
ge@linuxbox.org.

Follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/gadievron

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Emacs browser? Yummy.

- Avi Freedman.

Anonymous said...

IDA Python changed my life

navtej said...

Mark Hammond started this project http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/008865.html . At the latest PyCon he gave a keynote "Snake Charming the Dragon: the Past, Present, and Future of Python and Mozilla".

Another interesting project in this space is http://nufox.berlios.de/

Gadi Evron said...

navtej: thank you, That's really great! :)