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© 2026 Doyensec LLC 
9+ months. One unresolved vulnerability. One disclosure published today.
Following a last-minute request from the affected vendor, we’ve temporarily taken the technical details offline and agreed to provide one final, limited window for remediation.
We believe responsible disclosure goes both ways.
The clock is running again ⏰
Authorization testing is one of the most repetitive, yet critical tasks in web app security testing. Checking for horizontal and vertical privilege escalation, IDORs, and other access control issues requires constantly swapping cookies and headers between different user sessions, a process that is error-prone and often becomes tedious.
Today, we’re excited to release Session Switcher, a Burp Suite extension that lets you save and switch HTTP sessions with just a couple of clicks, right from the request editor.
During a typical authorization test, you might very often find yourself needing to to:
Doing this manually a couple of times is fine, but having to repeat it multiple times across different endpoints is slow, breaks your focus, and makes it easy to mix up sessions or forget to update expired tokens, potentially leading to false positives and negatives. I don’t know about everyone else, but the number of times I’ve had to go back and replace the cookies again because I wasn’t sure whether I had copied the correct ones is more than I care to admit.
Session Switcher adds a Sessions tab directly into Burp’s request editor where you can store named sessions (basically a set of cookies and headers) and swap between them with a single click. Instead of copying and pasting authentication data across requests, you save each user’s session once and then switch to it from a dropdown whenever you need to test a different user/role/tenant. The extension also monitors Proxy traffic and can automatically keep sessions up to date, mirroring the browser, so your stored sessions stay valid throughout the entire engagement.
To save a session, select any request containing the cookies and headers you want to store and click the New button in the Sessions tab of the request editor. The extension automatically extracts all cookies and uncommon headers from that request.
Once you have saved sessions, a session selector appears in the Sessions tab of the request editor. Choose a session from the dropdown and the extension instantly replaces the request’s cookies and headers with the saved ones.
This works wherever there’s an editable request editor, such as in Repeater and with intercepted Burp Proxy requests. Buttons under the selector let you Edit, Delete, or Update the selected session from the current request, or create a New one.
By default, the session list is filtered to only show sessions matching the current request’s domain, keeping things clean when you have many sessions stored.
The main Sessions tab lists all sessions stored in your project file, giving you a centralized view to inspect and manage all saved sessions.
One of the most powerful features is the ability to automatically keep sessions up to date with the current state of the browser. You can define rules that monitor browser traffic going through Burp Proxy and update sessions whenever new cookies or headers are detected.
For example, you could create a rule that tracks all requests containing the X-User: alice header and automatically updates the alice session whenever the cookies change. This means you no longer have to manually update sessions when a JWT expires or you re-authenticate in the browser.
This is the simplest example, but much more complex conditions are available, such as tracking JWTs by payload. Check out the documentation for details.
If the default behavior doesn’t quite fit your workflow, the settings panel lets you tweak things like how cookies and headers are captured from requests and how they get applied when you switch sessions. Some of the options may be confusing, so make sure to check out the documentation for all the available options and what they do.
Download the latest .jar from the releases page and load it in Burp as a Java extension.
This extension will also be available on the PortSwigger BApp Store as soon as our submission is approved. Due to the current review backlog, our request has not yet been processed, even though it was submitted on April 29th, 2026.
Note: Session Switcher requires Burp Suite v2025.5 or later.
We have a few ideas on where to take Session Switcher next:
These are still on the drawing board, so if any of these sound particularly useful (or if you have other ideas), let us know!
We’d love to hear how you use Session Switcher and what could make it better for your workflow. Whether it’s a bug report, a feature idea, or just general feedback, don’t hesitate to open an issue on GitHub or reach out on social media (@Doyensec). Pull requests are also very welcome!
Doyensec performed a side-by-side comparison of two leading AI-powered penetration testing platforms: Aikido’s Attack AI Pentest and XBOW’s Lightspeed in order to evaluate their abilities to properly identify vulnerabilities in modern web applications. This included manually validating all findings and classifying them as either true positives or false positives. Additionally, we looked at their overall testing process, including the configuration, impact on tested applications, quality and content of the reports, cost, and speed.
As a leading boutique application security consultancy, we were also curious about how the adoption of AI will impact the future of testing. To understand the current maturity levels of these AI platforms, it was necessary for us to put some vendors’ claims to the test.
If you’re interested in the current state of AI-powered pentesting, we encourage you to give it a read:
After our last episode on Multi-SSO Cognito User Pools, we are back with another issue. This time, we are looking at one of those AWS components that is everywhere and rarely questioned deeply enough: the Elastic Load Balancer.
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes traffic to backend services and serves as the entry point between the Internet and your applications.
It supports Layer 7 routing (Application Load Balancer - ALB) and Layer 4 routing (Network Load Balancer - NLB). It decides where traffic goes and under which conditions. ELB is commonly found fronting multiple applications, environments, and trust zones across the same infrastructure.
ELB is often the first public entry point before application backends, and in many AWS environments, it also becomes part of the access-control boundary. For ALBs, listener rules do more than route traffic: they can enforce authentication with authenticate-oidc or authenticate-cognito, restrict access with source-ip conditions, and decide which target group receives a request based on host, path, headers, or other request attributes.
The simplified flow below shows how a single request can be routed through different rules depending on priority and matching conditions:
That makes the listener rule chain security-sensitive. A backend may appear protected when looking at a single rule, but still be reachable through another rule, another listener, another ALB, or a direct network path that bypasses the expected entry point.
Misconfigurations there could:
source-ip restrictionStandard load balancer reviews usually focus on resource level hygiene: TLS policies, access logging, deletion protection, security groups, and whether a WAF is attached. These checks are useful, but they mostly describe how the load balancer is configured, without an offensive mindset.
They do not answer the important question: what can an external request actually reach?
What usually gets missed during load balancer audits:
The following are some of the routing and exposure misconfigurations we encounter most often during AWS load balancer reviews. They are not the only possible ELB issues, but they are representative of a broader class of bugs where the configured routing graph does not match the intended security boundary.
CloudFront is often placed in front of an ALB to enforce WAF rules, geo-restrictions, caching policies, or rate limiting. In this setup, the ALB is expected to behave like a private origin: users should reach it only through CloudFront, not directly.
The problem appears when the origin ALB is still Internet-facing and its security group allows public inbound traffic. In that case, an attacker could send requests directly to the ALB DNS name, bypassing every control enforced at the CloudFront layer, including WAF rules attached to the distribution.
ALB listener rules are evaluated in ascending-priority order. A rule with priority 10 is evaluated before one with priority 20. If a broad rule (e.g., path /*) sits at priority 10 and a more restrictive rule (e.g., path /admin* with authenticate-oidc) sits at priority 20, all traffic to /admin matches the broad rule first. The auth action never fires.
(priority) (condition) (action)
[10] path /* → forward → tg-app (no auth)
[20] path /admin* → authenticate-oidc → tg-app (← never reached for /admin)
This is purely an ordering bug with a direct authentication bypass impact.
A common pattern is to restrict access to an Internal backend by placing a source-ip condition on the rule:
(priority) (condition) (action)
[10] source-ip 1.2.3.4/32 → forward → tg-internal-api
[default] → 403
That works only if the protected backend is not reachable through any other path. The issue appears when the same target group, or the same backend instances, are also registered behind another load balancer with weaker conditions.
When that alternate route exists, the source-ip gate is real, but it only protects one path to the backend. The backend remains exposed through the weaker route, where the same IP restriction is not enforced.
That demonstrates why listener rules cannot be reviewed in isolation. The key question is not only “Does this rule restrict access?” but “Is every path to these targets protected by a similar control?”
Typical CSPM and audit checklists report on attributes - TLS version, logging flag, and WAF presence - but none of that tells you whether an /supposedly/protected/endpoint path is actually protected end-to-end, whether a CloudFront-fronted ALB is directly reachable, or whether the same backend instance appears in both a gated and an ungated rule.
That requires understanding the routing graph, not just the resource properties.
When reviewing an AWS account with ALBs, answer the following questions:
routing.http.xff_header_processing.mode set to preserve? If yes, does any downstream service trust X-Forwarded-For for access decisions?When ELBs are used widely across the infrastructure for routing, authentication, or IP-based restrictions, treat the ALB listener rule chain as part of your access-control model, not just networking configuration. Priority ordering matters as much as the conditions themselves. Review it the same way you would review middleware ordering in an application framework.
Do not treat a single IP gate as complete protection for a sensitive backend. A source-ip condition only protects the route where it is enforced. If the same targets are reachable through another ALB, listener, or port without equivalent restrictions, the backend may still be exposed. Combine source-ip conditions with authentication when possible, and verify that no alternate route reaches the same targets.
Lock down security groups on ALB origins. If a CloudFront distribution fronts an ALB, the ALB’s security group inbound rules should allow only CloudFront-managed prefix lists (com.amazonaws.global.cloudfront.origin-facing), not 0.0.0.0/0.
Set routing.http.xff_header_processing.mode to append or remove on Internet-facing ALBs. If the final backend uses client IP information for access-control decisions, rate limiting, audit logging, or security monitoring, do not allow clients to control the X-Forwarded-For header value.
Some of the issues above are hard to spot by looking at a single listener or load balancer in isolation. Finding them requires correlating listeners, rules, target groups, backend instances, and reachability across the whole ELB surface. Doing this manually is time-consuming and annoying, especially in large AWS accounts with a lot of load balancers.
This is why we built doyensec/ELBaph to automate exactly this.
It is a read-only CLI tool written in Go that maps ALBs, NLBs, listeners, rules, and targets into a single routing model. It then looks for exposed paths, runs targeted HTTP/HTTPS reachability probes, and generates a structured report with the root cause, exploit path, and remediation for each finding.
It works with SecurityAudit-style read-only permissions and outputs findings live to the terminal as each check completes, alongside a JSON, Markdown, or SARIF report and an interactive topology.html that maps the full routing graph from VPC to backend targets.
# Scan a region - findings printed live, output folder created automatically
elbaph scan --region us-east-1
# Scan multiple regions using an AWS profile
elbaph scan --all-regions -p my-pentest-profile
ELBaph gave us the extra leverage needed to scale manual ELB reviews. Let us know your feedback!
We also developed a Terraform (IaC) laboratory to deploy a vulnerable dummy application and play with the vulnerability: https://github.com/doyensec/cloudsec-tidbits/tree/main/lab-elbaph
The lab deploys two Internet-facing ALBs, a CloudFront distribution in front of the public one, and two EC2 instances running a small Go web application, showcasing a few of the misconfigurations described above.