PD follows UNIX philosophy: creating small, fast, and modular tools that do one thing exceptionally well and can be piped together into automated workflows.
There are 3 core pillars in PD:
Asset Discovery & Reconnaissance: To find everything a company owns on Internet. Tools used: Subfinder, HTTPX, Naabu.
Vulnerability Scanning: To uncover and validate vulnerabilities including “zero-day”. Tools used: Nuclei, Cent.
Cloud & Infrastructure: To fetch assets from cloud providers using API keys. Tool used: Cloudlist.
Most tools in PD are written in Go and designed to handle massive scale. And all tools in PD support JSON output and stdin/stdout. This simplify the effort to chain them together in BASH scripting or running at cmdline.
A typical security engineer can use PD tools to find all subdomains (subfinder),
to see which ports (naabu) are open on those subdomains,
to identify (https) any web server including what technology used,
and to scan (nuclei) for know vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.
Prerequisites#
The most efficient way to manage the ProjectDiscovery suite is through their official ProjectDiscovery Tool Manager (pdtm).
And all PD tools require Go (Golang) version 1.21 or higher to run.
% sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
% wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.22.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
% sudo rm -rf /usr/local/go && sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.22.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
% echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$(go env GOPATH)/bin' >> ~/.zshrc
% source ~/.zshrc
Verify with:
go version
Installation: PDTM#
Install pdtm using Go.
% go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/pdtm/cmd/pdtm@latest
Verify with:
pdtm -version
Installation: Tools#
Use pdtm to download and install all the binaries.
% pdtm -ia
All tools are install in
~/.pdtm/go/bin/. Add this to PATH.
% echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.pdtm/go/bin' >> ~/.zshrc
% source ~/.zshrc
Verify the installation:
subfinder -h,httpx -version,nuclei -version
To keep all tools fresh, just run:
pdtm -ua
Links#
- GitHub: ProjectDiscovery
- Learn about ProjectDiscovery’s Open Source Tools