Photon is a command-line web crawler designed for security reconnaissance and information gathering. It systematically traverses websites to discover URLs, map domain infrastructure, and identify associated subdomains by retrieving DNS records.
The tool distinguishes itself through its ability to perform deep content analysis, including the extraction of sensitive data such as API keys and authentication tokens using user-defined regular expressions. It supports offline inspection by cloning crawled web content to the local filesystem, allowing for structural analysis without additional network activity.
The crawler utilizes multi-threaded execution to maximize throughput during discovery and supports proxy-aware routing to manage traffic origin. Its architecture is built for integration into automated security workflows, allowing users to pipe discovered metadata and extracted patterns directly to standard output or export results into structured files for further processing.
