Nmap Development mailing list archives

How about sometimes showing an OS fingerprint even if there's a match?


From: David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2015 13:49:38 -0700

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 09:27:23AM -0500, Daniel Miller wrote:
As David pointed out in his talk at AISec [1], the IPv6 OS fingerprint engine
doesn't get nearly as many submissions. Since April, we received only 9
fingerprint submissions! There are a few reasons this could be:

* People aren't scanning IPv6 systems. Even if you don't have IPv6 setup on
your network, you can often talk IPv6 to your LAN neighbors. Try using some of
the targets-ipv6-multicast-* NSE scripts to discover interesting things!

* There are relatively fewer IPv6 stacks out there. Every printer, switch, or
lightbulb out there speaks IPv4, so we get lots of interesting submissions, but
IPv6 submissions are pretty much all for the major desktop and server OSs.

* The IPv6 engine is good at classifying things it hasn't seen before. This
means that Nmap is less likely to print a fingerprint and request submission,
even when something is different about the print that would cause a mismatch
under the IPv4 system. We should investigate printing a submission prompt even
when there's a good match if the novelty factor is on the high end.

What about if we print a submission fingerprint with a low probability
(like 0.1%) even when there is a match? Then we might get more
fingerprints and corrections for our existing classes. We would add a
special marker to these fingerprints, because people might be tempted to
just fill in whatever Nmap already guessed.
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