Performance Issues | Active Scanning Technology Detection Methods

We have discussed at some length the process of identifying ports and handling TCP connections. All of these factors have to be taken into consideration during the scan; however, the scanner cannot wait too long. At some point, the transaction attempt will “time out.” This phenomenon can be referred to as discovery tolerance. Various vendors have different levels of discovery tolerance. The amount of tolerance is loosely proportional to the accuracy of the discovery with rapidly diminishing probability of successful identification. Fortunately, we know from experience that there is no point waiting for a reply beyond a certain amount of time. Determining that point is the real skill in any fingerprinting activity. The goal is to be complete and accurate, but there is a law of diminishing returns. Two key timers affect the speed of the discovery process: the connection establishment timer and the retransmission timer.

For many TCP implementations, the connection establishment timer (TCP_KEEPINIT parameter) waits 75 seconds for response. A simple scan on a single port for 200 hosts would require over four hours to complete if none of the hosts responded. This must be adjusted to wait far less time. One effective approach is to take the maximum roundtrip time (RTT) of ICMP echo reply exchanges and add two seconds. This provides ample time for an application to respond on the required port and is likely to be far shorter than the default of 75 seconds.

With TCP connections, a discovery process can also vary the retransmission timer when additional packets are to be exchanged with the target. In normal communications, the timer begins with a value of 1.5 seconds. If no response is received, then the value is doubled to three seconds. If there is still no SYN-ACK, the timer is doubled again and we wait six seconds. This continues repeatedly until we reach a limit of 64 seconds. The process is called exponential backoff (EB). In theory, this should parallel the exponential probability that a response will ultimately be received. However, this is often impractical for host discovery purposes in vulnerability scanning. A typical OS can spend several minutes waiting for a connection to time out.

A more practical approach would be to sequentially increase the retransmission timer by smaller values for a total period of time to be some factor above the average for the target IP range. For example, let’s suppose that we are performing a discovery of network A (192.168.10.0/24) with an upper limit of 30 seconds for retransmission. If the first 16 hosts required an average of 10 seconds to respond and the mode was five seconds, we might start our retransmission timer at five seconds and increase the value by five seconds until an upper limit of 20 seconds was reached (2× average). This is a more sensible approach that will avoid a common IP stack value that can reach several minutes for a single connection. Remember that our goal is discovery of open ports and live hosts, not the reliable transmission of data to another host.

There is one other item that can be manipulated, which is not exactly a timer and can speed the discovery process considerably:

to implement all the timers TCP only requires that two functions are called periodically: (1) the fast timer is called every 200 ms and (2) the slow timer every 500 ms. TCP uses these two periodic ‘ticks’ to schedule and check all the timers described…as well as measuring round trip times.^[*]

Basically, the OS kernel must check every 200 ms to see if an acknowledgment has been received. In modern networks and operating systems, this is a very long time.

By decreasing this period, the discovery processes can recognize that the probing SYN packets it has sent have been acknowledged in a shorter time, and move on to the next probe. If the RTT from SYN to SYN-ACK is 10 ms, then under normal circumstances, the discovery process can wait for up to 190 ms to proceed with the next action. Multiply this number by hundreds of hosts and dozens of ports, and the wasted time can be tremendous.

The one caveat to modifying TCP timers is that some applications are simply slow to respond. This approach works best when probing for open ports but not necessarily for applications. There is a lot of room for creativity in scan performance optimization. This section simply illustrates some of the challenges designers can be confronted with when trying to optimize the scan process and minimize the impact on the network.

1 Black Box Testing

Once the presence of a host has been established and that presence recorded in the memory of the scanner, a series of tests or “checks” are performed to find vulnerabilities. The types of checks are dependent upon the type of host and the configuration of the scanner. Generally, two types of checks are performed. A network-based or surface check is performed, which involves the probing and analysis of what is evident with limited or no access to services on the machine other than what is offered to any other peer on the same network as that which exists between the scanner and the target. This is also known as an unauthenticated check. The other type of check is an authenticated, internal check or white box test. It is performed when the scanner is given special information and credentials to access details of the host, which are generally reserved for trusted entities.

The difference between surface and internal checks is obviously significant not only in the way they obtain information, but also in the value and quality of that information. Clearly, more detailed data can be obtained by logging into a host and perusing its configuration. Although the information tells us a lot about the host, it does not typically represent the view of an attacker who performs reconnaissance on an unknown host. Although valuable from an analysis standpoint, some attacks take place by probing the host from the view of an outsider; therefore, information that can be obtained in the same fashion is often more valuable. To summarize, a vulnerability discovered and exploitable from outside a host represents a greater exposure than if the same vulnerability could only be discovered and exploitable from a credentialed or internal check.

There is a common perception that authenticated checks are more accurate than remote checks but that’s often not true. The Windows registry is commonly used for authenticated checks but is often wrong. It’s important to consider that not all authenticated checks are created equal and that a remote check is a good method of validating authenticated information.

The black box testing process involves some straightforward testing over the network and possibly some creative use of IP and other protocols. Usually, the simple tests are harmless and efficient. The more exotic manipulation of IP protocols can cause problems on scanned hosts with applications that are ill-prepared to handle many variations. This is a vulnerability in itself. The IP stack of the host is usually capable of handling nearly any variety of traffic, but the overlying applications sometimes are not. It is another area that calls for extensive testing in order to avoid adverse effects on production systems. Most vendors are able to provide a list of known negative application interactions.

Following is a list of some common methods of reconnaissance:

• Malformed packets are sent to the host to identify the presence of a vulnerability in the response. This is similar to the discovery process and is sometimes incorporated into the same phase for efficiency. The information sent to the target can be at any one layer or multiple combinations of layers 3 through 7 in the OSI Model.
• Normal packets are sent to a known application to obtain results that will reveal vulnerability information. This is very common in the http protocol to obtain information about the Web server, application server, or back-end databases.
• Valid information is sent to the target to gather valid header response data that will reveal the version of software answering the service request. This is known as banner checking. Many software applications can obfuscate this information with simple configuration changes, so it is not the most reliable method.

These methods can be summarized conceptually in pseudo code form:

Send X to target
Listen for response Y
Match Y to possible response list
If Y is on list, note vulnerability
If Y is not on list, ignore
Get next check; Loop