With the incorporation of Burp Suite Professional into our audit processes, we discovered that there was not an easy method to extract results from Burp’s session file without having to manually re-run Burp. In order to automate this process, we have developed a standalone Python script to process Burp’s session files into XML, and have released it under the GPLv3 License here burp2xml.py
XML will allow you to pull out all types of useful data and feed it to other tools or make scripting an output report much easier. We will be blogging about tips (here) to use this pretty soon, let us know what you think. Shout-out to Paul Haas for all the hard work 
#!/usr/bin/env python
#Developed by Paul Haas, <phaas AT redspin DOT com> under Redspin. Inc.
#Licensed under the GNU Public License version 3.0 (2008-2009)
'''Process Burp Suite Professional's output into a well-formed XML document.
Burp Suite Pro's session file zipped into a combination of XML-like tags
containing leading binary headers with type and length definitions followed by
the actual data. The theory is that this allows the file to read sequentially
rather than requiring tedious XML parsing. However, without re-writing Burp's
internal parser, we have no way to extract results from its files without
loading the results in Burp.
This tool takes a zipped Burp file and outputs a XML document based upon the
provided arguments which allows regular XPATH queries and XSL transformations.
'''
import datetime, string, re, struct, zipfile, sys
TAG = re.compile('</?(\w*)>',re.M) # Match a XML tag
nvprint = string.printable.replace('\x0b','').replace('\x0c','') # Printables
def milliseconds_to_date(milliseconds):
'''Convert milliseconds since Epoch (from Java) to Python date structure:
See: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Date.html
There is no direct way to convert milliseconds since Epoch to Python object
So we convert the milliseconds to seconds first as a POSIX timestamp which
can be used to get a valid date, and then use the parsed values from that
object along with converting mili -> micro seconds in a new date object.'''
try:
d = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(milliseconds/1000)
date = datetime.datetime(d.year,d.month,d.day,d.hour,d.minute,d.second,
(milliseconds%1000)*1000)
except ValueError, e: # Bad date, just return the milliseconds
date = str(milliseconds)
return date
def burp_binary_field(field,i):
'''Strip Burp Suite's binary format characters types from our data.
The first character after the leading tag describes the type of the data.'''
if len(field) <= i:
return None,-1
elif field[i] == '\x00': # 4 byte integer value
return str(struct.unpack('>I',field[i+1:i+5])[0]),5
elif field[i] == '\x01': # Two possible unsigned long long types
if field[i+1] == '\x00': # (64bit) 8 Byte Java Date
ms = struct.unpack('>Q',field[i+1:i+9])[0]
date = milliseconds_to_date(ms)
value = date.ctime() # Use the ctime string format for date
else: # Serial Number only used ocasionally in Burp
value = str(struct.unpack('>Q',field[i+1:i+9])[0])
return value,9
elif field[i] == '\x02': # Boolean Object True/False
return str(struct.unpack('?',field[i+1:i+2])[0]),2
elif field[i] == '\x03' or field[i] == '\x04': # 4 byte length + string
length = struct.unpack('>I',field[i+1:i+5])[0]
#print "Saw string of length",length,"at",i+5,i+5+length
value = field[i+5:i+5+length]
if '<' in value or '>' in value or '&' in value: # Sanatize HTML w/CDATA
value = '<![CDATA[' + value.replace(']]>',']]><![CDATA[') + ']]>'
value = ''.join(c for c in value if c in nvprint) # Remove nonprintables
return value,5+length # ** TODO: Verify length by matching end tag **
print "Unknown binary format",repr(field[i])
return None,-1
def burp_to_xml(filename):
'''Unzip Burp's file, remove non-printable characters, CDATA any HTML,
include a valid XML header and trailer, and return a valid XML string.'''
xml = '' # Our output string
z = zipfile.ZipFile(filename) # Open Burp's zip file
burp = z.read('burp','rb') # Read-in the main burp file
m = TAG.match(burp,0) # Match a tag at the start of the string
while m:
xml += m.group()
index = m.end()
etag = m.group().replace('<','</') # Matching tag
m = TAG.match(burp,index) # Attempt to get the next tag
if not m: # Data folows
# Read the type of data using Burp's binary data headers
value, length = burp_binary_field(burp, index)
if value is None: break
xml += value
xml += etag
index += length + len(etag) # Point our index to the next tag
m = TAG.match(burp,index) # And retrieve it
xml = '<?xml version="1.0"?><burp>' + xml + '</burp>' # XMLify our string
return xml # And return it
def main():
'''Called if script is run from the command line.'''
import sys
if (len(sys.argv) < 2):
print __doc__
print "Usage:",sys.argv[0],"burp_session_file {output XML name}"
exit(1)
xml = burp_to_xml(sys.argv[1])
# Write out file to a optional argument or provided file + xml extension
out = sys.argv[2] if (len(sys.argv) > 2) else sys.argv[1]+'.xml'
out = open(out, 'wb')
out.write(xml)
out.close()
#sys.stdout.write("# Output written to %s.xml" % out)
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()