Analyzing Traffic Patterns

The History tab provides comprehensive traffic analysis capabilities essential for manual testing. Every request and response passing through ZAP appears here with detailed metadata. Filter and search functions help identify interesting traffic among thousands of requests. Understanding application behavior through traffic analysis reveals security weaknesses automated tools miss.

Parameter analysis across multiple requests identifies security-relevant patterns. Sort requests by URL to see how parameters change across similar endpoints. Look for incrementing IDs suggesting insecure direct object references, session tokens that don't change indicating session fixation vulnerabilities, or parameters that appear to control access permissions. Pattern recognition develops with experience.

Response size anomalies often indicate successful attacks or information disclosure. Sort responses by size to identify outliers. Unusually large responses might contain error messages with stack traces or debug information. Small responses could indicate blocked requests or authentication failures. Compare response sizes for similar requests with different parameters to identify meaningful variations.