How to connect OWASP Amass to PowerBI

I've spent the past couple months building a PowerBI template to report on data from the open-source attack surface discovery tool Amass developed by OWASP.

While Amass is a fantastic open-source tool that rivals the six-figure vendor tools, it lacks in the user interface department. But you don't need to learn to write a react frontend, you just need Microsoft PowerBI and these three simple steps:

1. Run scans in Amass to generate the SQLite database file

2. Install a SQLite ODBC driver

3. Connect to the database file through PowerQuery using the ODBC connector

I'll be walking you through these three steps to create something like this:

Step One: Run scans in Amass to generate the SQLite database file

When you run a scan in Amass, the tool will not just generate an output in the command line, but create or update a SQLite graph database. A graph database differs from a relational database (think tabular data) in that it is comprised of nodes (representing objects) and edges (representing relationships).

Whenever you run an enumeration scan in Amass, it will either generate a new database if one does not exist, or update an existing database.

Because of this, instead of trying to generate csv output, we'll just connect straight to the SQLite database.

But wait… there's a slight hickup

Step Two: Install a SQLite ODBC driver

In PowerBI, we can't connect directly to a SQLite file (.sqlite).

However, there is a way we can accomplish this: Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).

ODBC is an open standard for connecting to databases and other data stores. However, despite what you might think, there is no native ODBC support for SQLite. Luckily, there are third-party drivers available.

While there are some commercial options available, the most common driver I've seen used is by ch-werner which is open-source.

Step Three: Connect to the database file through PowerQuery using the ODBC connector

Now that we have an ODBC SQLite driver installed, we can connect directly to the Amass database from PowerBI.

Simply open up PowerQuery & select the ODBC connector.

When prompted for the connection string, use the following:

driver={SQLite3 ODBC Driver};database=*file path to the sqlite file*

Boom! You can now report directly off the SQLite database maintained by Amass in PowerBI.

Building dashboards off Amass brings it pretty darn close to commercial attack surface discovery tooling, with the added benefit of being able to completely customize the reporting you create to meet your needs.

Plus, if you want to skip the whole building the reports thing, I've got a template that will take care of the rest.