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Ah can’t believe I haven’t posted about this one before, one of my favourite tools! It was a big breakthrough to have a passive OS-fingerprinting tool after relying on Nmap and Xprobe2 for the longest time.
OS fingerprinting is a very important part of a pen-test during the information gathering stage.
P0f v2 is a versatile passive OS fingerprinting tool. P0f can identify the operating system on:
- machines that connect to your box (SYN mode),
- machines you connect to (SYN+ACK mode),
- machine you cannot connect to (RST+ mode),
- machines whose communications you can observe.
P0f can also do many other tricks, and can detect or measure the following:
- firewall presence, NAT use (useful for policy enforcement),
- existence of a load balancer setup,
- the distance to the remote system and its uptime,
- other guy’s network hookup (DSL, OC3, avian carriers) and his ISP.
All this even when the device in question is behind an overzealous packet firewall, when our favourite active scanner can’t do much. P0f does not generate ANY additional network traffic, direct or indirect. No name lookups, no mysterious probes, no ARIN queries, nothing. How? It’s simple: magic. Find out more here.
P0f is quite useful for gathering all kinds of profiling information about your users, customers or attackers (IDS, honeypot, firewall), tech espionage (laugh…), active or passive policy enforcement (restricting access for certain systems or otherwise handling them differently; or detecting guys with illegal network hookups using masquerade detection), content optimization, pen-testing (especially with SYN+ACK and RST+ACK modes), thru-firewall fingerprinting… plus all the tasks active fingerprinting is suitable for. And, of course, it has a high coolness factor, even if you are not a sysadmin.
P0f v2 is lightweight, secure and fast enough to be run almost anywhere, hands-free for an extended period of time.
You can donwload p0f v2 here:
Or read more here.
navin says
Nice!! esp the agility and size (windows version is only 58 KB in size!!) It’s like Robin when nmap is Batman
elpeor says
It is nice, I just run it in eth0 with mldonkey working and I get all OS of all connections..
It gets 99% of OS guess, just some does not know what OS they use.
funny!
Lepht says
“It’s like Robin when Nmap is Batman”
absofuckinglutely.
navin says
“absofuckinglutely.” -Adding tht to my list of “favoritest” words!!
Pantagruel says
Indeed funny you never coverd p0f before, it did get mentioned a few times in other posts.
p0f appears to be more of a tooth pick compared to the swiss army knife Nmap ;)
akito85 says
i’ve never heard about this tool before im gonna give a try to this new knife :P
thanks for the info
backbone says
@Pentagruel:
swiss army knife – netcat
nmap – John Rambos knife :)
razta says
IronGeek made an app for windows which apparetly in most cases cloaks OS fingerprinting. Looks like its quite affective against p0f, and im sure you can edit the TCP/IP in Linux with out the help of any apps. However its quite a cool concept and apparetly works.
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/osfuscate-change-your-windows-os-tcp-ip-fingerprint-to-confuse-p0f-networkminer-ettercap-nmap-and-other-os-detection-tools