Network Scanning & Vulnerability Assessment with Report Generation

Abstract

Network scanning and vulnerability testing relies on tools and processes to scan the network and its devices for vulnerabilities. This aids in refining any organization's security policy due to identification of vulnerabilities, and guarantees that the security measures taken actually gives the protection that the organization expects and requires. Administrator needs to perform vulnerability scan periodically which helps them to uncover shortcomings of network security that can lead to device or information being compromised or destroyed by exploits. Different implementations & tools of network scanning have distinctive proficiency and have different kinds of outputs. These outputs are typically heterogeneous which makes the further analysis a challenging task. In this dissertation, two basic open source scanners are considered NMAP & OpenVAS. We show how to incorporate this two scanners into a decently outlined GUI and give reliable information. On the basis of impediments of NMAP and OpenVAS, another tool is developed which holds best of both devices alongside overcoming few drawbacks. Network scanner created under this dissertation performs scanning over the network identifying the active hosts and conjecture the OS of the remote hosts and installed programs into the remote hosts. Apart identifying the active hosts it could find open ports and list the services which are running in the host. Further vulnerabilities scanning is performed by comparing the information obtained from a network scan to a database of vulnerability signatures to produce a list of vulnerabilities that are presumably present in the network. Along with performing network scanning and vulnerability assessment, auto-scan mechanism is also added in new tool to test device when they are compromised. In this dissertation, features of new tool is explored. In other words, network mapping, vulnerabilities and configuration faults in network are shown in various formats. Also, an easy approach is defined to reduce the scan duration of vulnerability.