Bootable Nmap virtual network CD

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

Normally I consider including CDs with books to be a waste of plastic,
but I think the suggestion you guys have made for including Nmap and a
virtual test network on an included bootable (Knoppix or whatever) CD
is a fabulous idea!  Then they could just boot up and have Nmap
installed and ready to go.  The test network could be somewhere
obscure like 10.255.0.0/16 and could be used in many book examples.
It would also have normal network connectivity so that they can scan
their own network and Internet hosts as well.  A few notes.

o I don't think VMWare will work.  Obvious problems are that we can't
  redistribute it, nor can many popular OS images be redistributed.
  Those disk images are huge as well.  Honeyd is an excellent
  solution, and could be combined with iptables rules for certain faux
  hosts to demonstrate common configurations (deny-by-default,
  deny-certain-ports, etc).  There could also be IPs bound to loopback
  (w/o Honeyd) with various common daemons running (Apache, Sendmail,
  pop servers, whatever).

o These virtual hosts will never be quite as good as a real network to
  play on, but I feel the benefits outweigh the cons.

o This could be useful for other things as well.  People who give
  conference presentations on security would value such a
  distribution.

o Setting up a heterogeneous virtual network won't be trivial.

o I don't think honeyd supports the Nmap version detection spoofing
  (like it does OS detection), although I agree that would be cool for
  this purpose.  As discussed above, we could potentially run the real
  services anyway.

As fun as setting this up sounds, I am going to focus on writing for
now.  If anyone wants to work on a proof-of-concept ISO, that would be
great!  Otherwise I may be able to get to it after a few chapters are done.

Cheers,
Fyodor


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