OWASP OWTF helps penetration testers stay efficient and aligned with security standards such as the OWASP Web Security Testing Guide, the OWASP Top 10, PTES, and NIST so that they have more time to:

• See the big picture and think outside the box.
• Efficiently find, verify, and combine vulnerabilities.
• Investigate complex issues such as business logic flaws or multi-tenant edge cases.
• Perform targeted fuzzing on risky areas.
• Demonstrate meaningful impact despite tight assessment windows.

The tool is highly configurable, and anyone can create simple plugins or add new tests in configuration files without prior development experience.

Note OWTF is not a silver bullet. Understanding and experience are still required to interpret tool output correctly and decide where to investigate further in order to demonstrate impact.

Docker Compose is the supported way to run OWTF. It keeps the Python, frontend, PostgreSQL, and security-tool dependencies isolated from the host system.

Install Docker with the Compose plugin, then run:

git clone https://github.com/owtf/owtf.git
cd owtf
make compose-safe

When the services are ready, open http://localhost:8019.

Press Ctrl+C in the Compose terminal to stop OWTF. Native host installation is intended for contributors and is not a supported end-user installation path; see CONTRIBUTING.md for the development workflow.

Important Only scan systems you own or are explicitly authorised to test.

• Resilience: If one tool crashes, OWTF moves on to the next test and saves the partial output produced so far.
• Flexible: Pause and resume your work.
• Test separation: OWTF separates its traffic to the target into three plugin types:
  • Passive – No traffic is sent to the target.
  • Semi passive – Normal traffic to the target.
  • Active – Direct vulnerability probing.
• Extensive REST API.
• Standards coverage: OWASP Web Security Testing Guide, OWASP Top 10, NIST, PTES, and CWE-aligned workflows.
• Web interface: Manage large penetration engagements easily.
• Interactive report.
• Automated plugin rankings from tool output, fully configurable by the user.
• Configurable risk rankings.
• Inline notes editor for each plugin.

Check out LICENSE.

Check out the Code of Conduct.

• Project homepage
• OWASP project page
• Development documentation
• Releases
• OWASP Slack – join #project-owtf
• YouTube channel