Service-Fingerprinting mittels Fuzzing
This work addresses the need for more effective penetration testing tools in cybersecurity, though it is incremental as it builds on existing fingerprinting methods.
The paper tackled the problem of improving service fingerprinting tools by applying mutation-based fuzzing to identify subtle differences in response messages for better differentiation and identification of network services, and it demonstrated feasibility with an FTP server implementation that showed advantages over existing methods.
Service fingerprinting (i.e. the identification of network services and other applications on computing systems) is an essential part of penetration tests. The main contribution of this paper is a study on the improvement of fingerprinting tools. By applying mutation-based fuzzing as a fingerprint generation method, subtle differences in response messages can be identified. These differences in response messages provide means for the differentiation and identification of network services. To prove the feasibility of the approach, an implementation of a fingerprinting tool for ftp servers is presented and compared to preexisting fingerprinting tools. As a result of this study it is shown that mutation-based fuzzing is an appropriate method for service fingerprinting that even offers advantages over preexisting methods.