WARNING: this page was last updated in 1997 and is completely out
of date. If you aren't here for historical purposes, check out the
newer docs from the Nmap documentation page.
This paper details many of the techniques used to determine what ports (or
similar protocol abstraction) of a host are listening for connections. These
ports represent potential communication channels. Mapping their existence
facilitates the exchange of information with the host, and thus it is quite
useful for anyone wishing to explore their networked environment, including
hackers. Despite what you have heard from the media, the Internet is NOT
all about TCP port 80. Anyone who relies exclusively on the WWW for
information gathering is likely to gain the same level of proficiency as your
average AOLer, who does the same. This paper is also meant to serve as an
introduction to and ancillary documentation for a coding project I have been
working on. It is a full featured, robust port scanner which (I hope) solves
some of the problems I have encountered when dealing with other scanners and
when working to scan massive networks. The tool, nmap, supports the following:
The freely distributable source code is available at http://nmap.org/
Introduction
Scanning, as a method for discovering exploitable communication channels, has
been around for ages. The idea is to probe as many listeners as possible, and
keep track of the ones that are receptive or useful to your particular need.
Much of the field of advertising is based on this paradigm, and the "to current
resident" brute force style of bulk mail is an almost perfect parallel to what
we will discuss. Just stick a message in every mailbox and wait for the
responses to trickle back.
Scanning entered the h/p world along with the phone systems. Here
we have this tremendous global telecommunications network, all
reachable through codes on our telephone. Millions of numbers are
reachable locally, yet we may only be interested in 0.5% of these
numbers, perhaps those that answer with a carrier.
The logical solution to finding those numbers that interest us is
to try them all. Thus the field of "wardialing" arose. Excellent
programs like Toneloc were developed to facilitate the probing of
entire exchanges and more. The basic idea is simple. If you dial a
number and your modem gives you a CONNECT, you record it. Otherwise
the computer hangs up and tirelessly dials the next one.
While wardialing is still useful, we are now finding that many of
the computers we wish to communicate with are connected through
networks such as the Internet rather than analog phone dialups.
Scanning these machines involves the same brute force technique. We
send a blizzard of packets for various protocols, and we deduce which
services are listening from the responses we receive (or don't
receive).
Techniques
Over time, a number of techniques have been developed for surveying the
protocols and ports on which a target machine is listening. They all offer
different benefits and problems. Here is a line up of the most common:
Prior to writing nmap, I spent a lot of time with other scanners
exploring the Internet and various private networks (note the
avoidance of the "intranet" buzzword). I have used many of the top
scanners available today, including strobe by Julian Assange, netcat
by *Hobbit*, stcp by Uriel Maimon, pscan by Pluvius, ident-scan by
Dave Goldsmith, and the SATAN tcp/udp scanners by Wietse Venema.
These are all excellent scanners! In fact, I ended up hacking most of
them to support the best features of the others. Finally I decided to
write a whole new scanner, rather than rely on hacked versions of a
dozen different scanners in my /usr/local/sbin. While I wrote all the
code, nmap uses a lot of good ideas from its predecessors. I also
incorporated some new stuff like fragmentation scanning and options
that were on my "wish list" for other scanners. Here are some of the
(IMHO) useful features of nmap:
dynamic delay time calculations: Some scanners require that you
supply a delay time between sending packets. Well how should I know
what to use? Sure, I can ping them, but that is a pain, and plus the
response time of many hosts changes dramatically when they are being
flooded with requests. nmap tries to determine the best delay time
for you. It also tries to keep track of packet retransmissions,
etc. so that it can modify this delay time during the course of the
scan. For root users, the primary technique for finding an initial
delay is to time the internal "ping" function. For non-root users, it
times an attempted connect() to a closed port on the target. It can
also pick a reasonable default value. Again, people who want to
specify a delay themselves can do so with -w (wait), but you shouldn't
have to.
retransmission: Some scanners just send out all the query packets,
and collect the responses. But this can lead to false positives or
negatives in the case where packets are dropped. This is especially
important for "negative" style scans like UDP and FIN, where what you
are looking for is a port that does NOT respond. In most cases, nmap
implements a configurable number of retransmissions for ports that
don't respond.
parallel port scanning: Some scanners simply scan ports linearly,
one at a time, until they do all 65535. This actually works for TCP
on a very fast local network, but the speed of this is not at all
acceptable on a wide area network like the Internet. nmap uses
non-blocking i/o and parallel scanning in all TCP and UDP modes. The
number of scans in parallel is configurable with the -M (Max sockets)
option. On a very fast network you will actually decrease performance
if you do more than 18 or so. On slow networks, high values increase
performance dramatically.
Flexible port specification: I don't always want to just scan all
65535 ports. Also, the scanners which only allow you to scan ports 1
- N sometimes fall short of my need. The -p option allows you to
specify an arbitrary number of ports and ranges for scanning. For
example, '-p 21-25,80,113, 60000-' does what you would expect (a
trailing hyphen means up to 65536, a leading hyphen means 1 through).
You can also use the -F (fast) option, which scans all the ports
registered in your /etc/services (a la strobe).
Flexible target specification: I often want to scan more then one
host, and I certainly don't want to list every single host on a large
network to scan. Everything that isn't an option (or option argument)
in nmap is treated as a target host. As mentioned before, you can
optionally append /mask to a hostname or IP address in order to scan
all hosts with the same initial bits of the 32 bit IP
address. You can use the same powerful syntax as the port
specifications to specify targets like '150.12.17.71-79.7.*'. '*' is
just a shortcut for 0-255, remember to escape it from your shell if
used.
detection of down hosts: Some scanners allow you to scan large
networks, but they waste a huge amount of time scanning 65535 ports of
a dead host! By default, nmap pings each host to make sure it is up
before wasting time on it. It also does thin in parallel, to speed
things up. You can change the parrallel ping lookahead with '-L' and
the ping timeout with '-T'. You can turn pinging off completely with
the '-D' command line option. This is useful for scanning networks
like microsoft.com where ICMP echo requests can't get through. Nmap
is also capable of bailing on hosts that seem down based on strange
port scanning errors. It is also meant to be tolerant of people who
accidentally scan network addresses, broadcast addresses, etc.
detection of your IP address: For some reason, a lot of scanners
ask you to type in your IP address as one of the parameters. Jeez, I
don't want to have to 'ifconfig' and figure out my current address
every time I scan. Of course, this is better then the scanners I've
seen which require recompilation every time you change your address!
nmap first tries to detect your address during the ping stage. It
uses the address that the echo response is received on, as that is the
interface it should almost always be routed through. If it can't do
this (like if you don't have host pinging enabled), nmap tries to
detect your primary interface and uses that address. You can also use
-S to specify it directly, but you shouldn't have to (unless you want
to make it look like someone ELSE is SYN or FIN scanning a
host.
Some other, more minor options:
-v (verbose): This is highly recommended for interactive use. Among other
useful messages, you will see ports come up as they are found, rather than
having to wait for the sorted summary list.
-r (randomize): This will randomize the order in which the target host's
ports are scanned.
-q (quash argv): This changes argv[0] to FAKE_ARGV ("pine" by default).
It also eliminates all other arguments, so you won't look too suspicious in
'w' or 'ps' listings.
-h for an options summary.
-R show and resolve all hosts, even down ones.
Also look for http://nmap.org/,
which is the web site I plan to put future versions and more
information on. In fact, you would be well advised to check there
right now. (If that isn't where you are reading this).
Example Usage
To launch a stealth scan of the entire class 'B' networks 166.66.0.0 and
166.67.0.0 for the popularly exploitable imapd daemon:
# nmap -Up 143 166.66.0.0/16 166.67.0.0/16
To do a standard tcp scan on the reserved ports of host
<target>:
> nmap target
To check the class 'C' network on which warez.com sits for popular
services (via fragmented SIN scan):
# nmap -fsp 21,22,23,25,80,110 warez.com/24
To scan the same network for all the services in your /etc/services
via (very fast) tcp scan:
> nmap -F warez.com/24
To scan secret.pathetic.net using the ftp bounce attack off of
ftp.pathetic.net:
> nmap -Db ftp.pathetic.net secret.pathetic.net
To find hosts that are up in the the adjacent class C's 193.14.12,
.13, .14, .15, ... , .30:
> nmap -P '193.14.[12-30].*'
If you don't want to have to quote it to avoid shell interpretation,
this does the same thing:
