VirtuProbe Studio
VirtuProbe Studio
Blog
Notes on byte-level testing, hand-rolled protocol stacks, and building a multi-protocol request workbench as an independent shop. No growth-hacking, no listicles, just the stuff we think about while making the tool.
A friend who runs engineering at an AI-first company installs an agent on a fresh server before anything else, and no longer writes instrumentation at all. That is a fair question to put to a testing tool. The answer I arrived at: determinism, repeatability and evidence are properties of the artifact, not of the actor. An agent authors, a person supervises through a glass box, and the frozen artifact runs with evidence. Plus the part I had backwards, and what is still not built.
Read the thesis →VirtuProbe's power was letting you hand-drive the protocol conversation: the exact EHLO, the malformed MAIL FROM. That's exactly what most people testing an integration don't want to do. Action Mode lets you state the outcome, send an email or find a message or check a login, and keeps the raw commands one click away. Plus why "find the latest message" had to be a small program, not a macro.
Read the design note →MCP looks like a whole new protocol to support. It isn't. It's JSON-RPC over HTTP with a session header and an optional event stream. The design story of teaching the HTTP probe to test Model Context Protocol servers: a body mode instead of a module, a session that's just a chain, and the one piece we genuinely had to build, streaming a response into the panel live.
Read the build log →MySQL is the ninth protocol and the only one not hand-written against the protocol. It is a thin layer over MariaDB Connector/J and HikariCP. The design decisions behind it: why an integration test should end in the row not the response, pooling by connection signature, treating a rejected statement as data rather than a crash, stringifying every cell, and why the auth escape-hatches ship off by default.
Read the build log →A practical walkthrough of AS-REP Roasting and Kerberoasting: talk straight to the KDC with a hand-rolled RFC 4120 stack, pull a crackable hash in hashcat format, and chain the whole thing off an LDAP lookup. For authorised testing, labs and CTF boxes.
Read the walkthrough →Request smuggling is one of the highest-impact web bugs and one of the most dangerous to confirm, because the textbook proof traps a real user's request. How VirtuProbe finds CL.TE and TE.CL desync by timing instead, on a client that sends raw bytes, without poisoning a victim.
Read the walkthrough →Most real tests aren't one request. They're a sequence where each step depends on the last. How the value gets from one step to the next: extractors, {{variables}} and control-flow steps, across HTTP, DNS, SMTP and LDAP in one runnable chain.
Read the walkthrough →When a model can ship an integration in an afternoon, "write the code" stops being the bottleneck. Knowing it actually works, under load and against malformed input and on the protocol that doesn't quite follow the spec, becomes the whole job. Why the running system is the only source of truth left.
Read the essay →A friend called VirtuProbe a "nice, semi-serious project". He meant it kindly; it stung, and it was right. The distance between a semi-serious tool and one an engineer trusts with their day isn't the feature list. It's the focus ring, the missing keyboard shortcut, the dialog that won't take your cursor. Notes on the thousand small frictions nobody screenshots.
Read the essay →VirtuProbe started as a plugin to patch the seams of a web-security proxy that fought me the moment work spanned more than one target and more than one protocol. Here's how a nightly side project on Hack The Box turned into a standalone tool with eight hand-rolled protocol stacks, and why I stopped patching someone else's foundation.
Read the story →