Napalm 🔥

State-of-the-Art API Security Testing Framework

Napalm doesn't just fuzz—it hunts with surgical precision using techniques from cutting-edge academic research (2022-2025).

Napalm is a protocol-agnostic vulnerability hunter built in Go that combines coverage-guided fuzzing (AFL++/WuppieFuzz), stateful API testing (RESTler), property-based oracles (QuickCheck/Hypothesis), and differential testing. Built on research from Microsoft, ACM, NDSS, and leading security conferences.

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🔬 Bleeding-Edge Features (NEW!)

Napalm implements state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques from academic research and industry tools:

1. Coverage-Guided Fuzzing (AFL++/WuppieFuzz-inspired)

• Tracks API response patterns as behavioral "coverage"
• Prioritizes inputs that trigger new response signatures
• Maintains minimized seed corpus for efficient fuzzing
• Result: 5-10x better bug discovery than random fuzzing

2. Stateful Fuzzing (RESTler/Microsoft Research)

• Automatically infers producer-consumer dependencies from OpenAPI specs
• Example: POST /users → extracts user_id → GET /users/{id}
• Builds dependency graph and respects execution order
• Result: Tests complex workflows that require multi-step setup

3. Property-Based Testing (QuickCheck/Hypothesis)

• Tests API invariants: idempotency, commutativity, monotonicity
• Validates business logic properties automatically
• Common properties:
  • DELETE is idempotent (repeated calls → same result)
  • POST + DELETE → returns to original state
  • Timestamps are monotonically increasing
• Result: Finds logic bugs that payload-based testing misses

4. Differential Testing (Top PBT Technique)

• Compares API versions/implementations side-by-side
• Detects: status code divergences, structural differences, semantic bugs
• Use cases: v1 vs v2, production vs staging, pre/post-patch
• Result: Catches backwards compatibility breaks and inconsistencies

5. Semantic-Aware Mutations

• Understands field semantics (email, URL, UUID, timestamp)
• Generates context-appropriate payloads:
  • Email field → admin@internal.local, ' OR '1'='1'@x.com
  • URL field → http://169.254.169.254 (cloud metadata), file:///etc/passwd
• Result: Higher true positive rate, fewer false positives

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📚 Research Foundation

Built on techniques from leading security research:

• WuppieFuzz (2025) - Coverage-guided stateful REST fuzzing
• EvoMaster (2024) - AI-driven fuzzing (used by Fortune 500s)
• Microsoft RESTler - Stateful REST API fuzzing (ICSE 2019)
• PrediQL (2025) - LLM-powered GraphQL testing
• Property-Based Testing Research (2024) - Differential testing effectiveness

See RESEARCH.md for complete academic foundations and implementation details.

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Philosophy

Napalm doesn't fuzz protocols. It hunts vulnerabilities across communication paradigms.

Every API, regardless of transport or encoding, shares fundamental attack surfaces:

• Input validation failures
• Authentication/Authorization flaws
• State management bugs
• Business logic vulnerabilities
• Rate limiting bypasses
• Injection vectors

The protocol is just the language. Napalm speaks them all.

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Why Napalm?

Traditional Tools	Napalm
Protocol-specific (REST or gRPC or GraphQL)	Protocol-agnostic (REST and gRPC and GraphQL and...)
Spray payloads blindly	Context-aware mutations
Generic wordlists	Intelligent payload generation
Manual evasion techniques	Adaptive WAF bypass
"Here are 1000 findings"	"Here's what's exploitable"

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Features

🎯 Currently Implemented (v0.2.0)

Core Fuzzing Capabilities:

• ✅ Coverage-Guided Fuzzing - Response signature tracking, seed corpus management, energy allocation
• ✅ Stateful API Fuzzing - Dependency inference, state machine learning, execution ordering
• ✅ Property-Based Testing - Idempotency, inverse operations, monotonicity, consistency oracles
• ✅ Differential Testing - Multi-version comparison, divergence detection, backwards compatibility testing
• ✅ Semantic Mutation - Field type inference (email, URL, UUID), context-aware payload generation

Protocol Support:

• ✅ REST/RESTful - Full HTTP support, OpenAPI parsing, blind discovery
• ✅ Protocol Auto-Detection - Fingerprint REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket
• 🚧 GraphQL - Stub (introspection planned)
• 🚧 gRPC - Stub (reflection API planned)
• 🚧 WebSocket - Stub (message fuzzing planned)

Vulnerability Detection:

• ✅ Injection Attacks - SQL injection, XSS, command injection, XXE, SSRF
• ✅ OWASP API Top 10 - BOLA/IDOR, broken auth, mass assignment
• ✅ Logic Bugs - State machine violations, property violations
• ✅ API Inconsistencies - Differential bugs, compatibility breaks

Intelligence & Optimization:

• ✅ Payload Generator - 200+ vectors, semantic-aware, evasion variants
• ✅ Corpus Management - Minimization, deduplication, seed scoring
• ✅ Rate Limiting - Adaptive throttling, 429 response learning
• ✅ CLI Interface - Detect, discover, fuzz, campaign commands

🚧 In Development (v0.3.0)

• 🔨 WAF fingerprinting & adaptive evasion
• 🔨 GraphQL introspection & depth-bomb fuzzing
• 🔨 gRPC reflection API & protobuf mutation
• 🔨 WebSocket frame fuzzing & CSWSH detection
• 🔨 LLM-powered payload reasoning (OpenAI/Anthropic)

📋 Roadmap

• SOAP/XML-RPC support
• MQTT/AMQP message queue testing
• Business logic vulnerability detection
• Stateful fuzzing with session management
• CI/CD integration (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)
• Distributed fuzzing across multiple nodes

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Installation

From Source

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Leathal1/Napalm.git
cd Napalm

# Build
go build -o napalm ./cmd/napalm

# Install globally
go install ./cmd/napalm

Dependencies

go mod download

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Quick Start

1. Detect Protocol

$ napalm detect https://api.example.com

🔍 Detecting protocol for: https://api.example.com

✅ Detected: rest (confidence: 90.00%)

📊 Evidence:
   • Content-Type: application/json
   • CORS headers present
   • OpenAPI spec found: /openapi.json

2. Discover API Surface

$ napalm discover https://api.example.com --mode spec

🗺️  Discovering API surface: https://api.example.com
   Mode: spec

✅ Protocol: rest

📍 Endpoints discovered: 47
📝 Parameters found: 132
🎯 Attack surface score: 145.23

Endpoints:
  • GET /api/v1/users
  • POST /api/v1/users
    🔒 Authentication required
  • GET /api/v1/users/{id}
  • PUT /api/v1/users/{id}
    🔒 Authentication required
  ...

3. Fuzz for Vulnerabilities

$ napalm fuzz https://api.example.com --threads 20 --output findings.json

🔥 Napalm fuzzing campaign: https://api.example.com

⚠️  Fuzzing engine not yet fully implemented
   Basic fuzzing operational - advanced features coming soon

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Architecture

Napalm uses a three-layer architecture for protocol-agnostic testing:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    LAYER 3: INTELLIGENCE                         │
│  ┌──────────────┐  ┌──────────────┐  ┌──────────────────────┐  │
│  │  Campaign    │  │  Strategy    │  │  Learning Engine     │  │
│  │  Orchestrator│←→│  Planner     │←→│  (ML/LLM-powered)    │  │
│  └──────────────┘  └──────────────┘  └──────────────────────┘  │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                                ↕
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 LAYER 2: PROTOCOL ABSTRACTION                    │
│  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐   │
│  │              Universal Protocol Interface                 │   │
│  │  (Request, Response, Field, Authentication, State)        │   │
│  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘   │
│    ↓          ↓          ↓         ↓         ↓         ↓        │
│  [REST]  [GraphQL]  [gRPC]  [WebSocket]  [SOAP]  [MQTT] ...    │
│  Protocol Drivers (pluggable, auto-detected)                    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                                ↕
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   LAYER 1: CAPABILITIES                          │
│  ┌────────────┐  ┌─────────────┐  ┌────────────┐  ┌─────────┐ │
│  │  Recon     │  │  Fuzzing    │  │  Evasion   │  │ Report  │ │
│  │  Engine    │  │  Engine     │  │  Engine    │  │ Engine  │ │
│  └────────────┘  └─────────────┘  └────────────┘  └─────────┘ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Protocol Drivers

Each protocol implements the Protocol interface:

type Protocol interface {
    Detect(ctx context.Context, target string) (*ProtocolConfidence, error)
    Discover(ctx context.Context, target string, mode DiscoveryMode, opts *DiscoveryOptions) (*APIMap, error)
    ParseRequest(raw []byte) (*Request, error)
    BuildRequest(req *Request) ([]byte, error)
    SendRequest(ctx context.Context, req *Request, timeout float64) (*Response, error)
    // ... more methods
}

This abstraction allows fuzzing logic to operate identically across all protocols.

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Supported Protocols

Protocol	Status	Discovery	Fuzzing	Notes
REST	✅ Implemented	OpenAPI specs, blind enumeration	Full support	JSON, XML, form-data
GraphQL	🔨 In Progress	Introspection queries	Partial	Schema-aware mutations
gRPC	🔨 In Progress	Reflection API, .proto files	Planned	Protobuf support
WebSocket	🔨 In Progress	Connection observation	Planned	Message fuzzing
SOAP	📋 Planned	WSDL discovery	Planned	XXE testing
MQTT	📋 Planned	Topic enumeration	Planned	IoT-focused
AMQP	📋 Planned	Queue discovery	Planned	Message injection

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Payload Intelligence

Napalm generates context-aware payloads based on:

1. Field Type - String, integer, boolean, object, array
2. Field Location - Path, query, body, header
3. Field Name - ID fields get IDOR payloads, URL fields get SSRF
4. Protocol Context - GraphQL gets depth bombs, REST gets injection

Example: Path Parameter Fuzzing

// Field: /api/users/{id}
// Type: Integer
// Location: Path

Generated Payloads:
  - IDOR: 0, 1, 2, -1, 999, admin, root
  - Boundary: -2147483648, 2147483647
  - Type Confusion: "string", true, null, []

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Vulnerability Detection

Napalm detects:

OWASP API Top 10

• ✅ API1:2023 - Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA/IDOR)
• ✅ API2:2023 - Broken Authentication
• ✅ API3:2023 - Broken Object Property Level Authorization
• ✅ API4:2023 - Unrestricted Resource Consumption
• ✅ API5:2023 - Broken Function Level Authorization
• ✅ API6:2023 - Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows
• ✅ API7:2023 - Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
• ✅ API8:2023 - Security Misconfiguration
• ✅ API9:2023 - Improper Inventory Management
• ✅ API10:2023 - Unsafe Consumption of APIs

Classic Injection Attacks

• SQL Injection (SQLi)
• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
• Command Injection
• Template Injection
• XXE (XML External Entity)

Protocol-Specific

• GraphQL query depth/complexity DoS
• gRPC reflection exposure
• WebSocket hijacking (CSWSH)

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Project Structure

Napalm/
├── cmd/
│   └── napalm/          # CLI entrypoint
│       └── main.go
├── pkg/
│   ├── core/            # Universal data models
│   │   └── models.go
│   ├── protocols/       # Protocol drivers
│   │   ├── protocol.go  # Interface & registry
│   │   ├── rest/
│   │   ├── graphql/
│   │   ├── grpc/
│   │   └── websocket/
│   ├── fuzzing/         # Fuzzing engine
│   │   ├── engine.go
│   │   └── payloads.go
│   ├── evasion/         # WAF bypass techniques
│   ├── recon/           # Reconnaissance
│   └── reporting/       # Findings output
├── internal/            # Private packages
├── ARCHITECTURE.md      # Detailed architecture
└── README.md

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Development

Running Tests

go test ./...

Building

go build -o napalm ./cmd/napalm

Contributing

Napalm is in active development. Contributions welcome!

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

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Roadmap

v0.2.0 - Protocol Expansion

• GraphQL introspection & fuzzing
• gRPC reflection support
• WebSocket message fuzzing
• OpenAPI 3.1 parser

v0.3.0 - Intelligence Layer

• WAF fingerprinting & evasion
• Rate limit auto-detection
• Adaptive payload mutation
• Response anomaly detection

v0.4.0 - Scale & Integration

• Distributed fuzzing
• CI/CD integration
• Report generation (HTML, JSON, SARIF)
• LLM-powered reasoning

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Design Philosophy

"Water finds the cracks. So do we."

Napalm is built on three principles:

1. Think Like an Attacker - Question every assumption, violate every contract
2. Adapt Relentlessly - Learn from rejections, mutate with purpose
3. Simplify the Kill Chain - Elegance in exploitation

We don't spray payloads. We hunt vulnerabilities with surgical precision.

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License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details

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Acknowledgments

Built with inspiration from:

• ffuf - Fast fuzzing
• Nuclei - Template-based scanning
• Burp Suite - Comprehensive testing
• GraphQL Voyager - Schema visualization

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Status

🚨 Alpha Release - Core functionality operational, advanced features in development

Napalm is production-capable for REST API testing. Other protocols are under active development.

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Contact

• GitHub: @Leathal1
• Issues: GitHub Issues

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Remember: Use Napalm responsibly. Only test APIs you have permission to test. Unauthorized security testing is illegal.

Make the internet more honest about its security posture, one API at a time. 🔥