[Solution] Disable the detectportal.firefox.com requests in Burp Suite

Approx a year back, Mozilla added a new feature “Captive Portal” support to Firefox browser in an attempt to enhance usability when connecting to free Wi-Fi portals.

Captive Portal feature covers the detection and implementation of handles for captive portals inside Firefox browser. Firefox is expected to handle the handling of a captive portal page upon detection of such. Certain business logic related to the detection and management of a captive portal is expected to be in place and documented in the Specs section.

Also Read: [Solution] SSL Handshake Alert Error – Burp Suite

This feature is really annoying when it comes to using Burp Suite as a proxy for Firefox. Because if you are a pentester, you are probably used using Firefox for traffic interception through Burp Intercept but along with normal requests, you may seen a lot of GET requests of /success.txt as shown below:

Seeing all those requests in Burp, much less thinking about all the noise they generate otherwise, is annoying. Because you probably won’t ever need to use a Captive Portal on your pentesting machine.

Open your Mozilla Firefox browser, and type “about:config” and click on “I accept the risk!” as shown in below screen.

Search “captive-portal” in the search bar and you’ll see some entries related to captive portal named as “network.captive-portal-service.enabled” whose default value is false and you just need to double click on the following entry to set it true.

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This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Actually, for me works exactly the opposite way, it was true by default and needs to be set “false” to work on burp.

  2. You can also try the below solution to fix above said –

    When you get any request from “detectportal.firefox.com” in BurpSuite, click the “Action” button, followed by “Do not intercept…”, and choose “requests to this host”.

    This should solve the problem without modifying Firefox.

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