A domain scanner
Scans domains for data on their HTTPS configuration and assorted other things.
Most of the work is farmed out to other command line tools. The point of this project is to coordinate those tools and produce consistent data output.
Can be used with any domain, or CSV where domains are the first column, such as the official .gov domain list.
Requirements
The requirements here can be quite diverse, because this tool is just a coordinator for other tools. Communication between tools is handled via CLI and STDOUT.
The overall tool requires Python 3. To install dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt
The individual scanners each require their own dependencies. You only need to have the dependencies installed for the scanners you plan to use.
inspect
scanner: Ruby and site-inspector, version 1.0.2 only.pshtt
scanner: Python 2 and pshtt, ideally installed withpyenv
viapip install pshtt
.tls
scanner: Go and ssllabs-scan, stable branch.sslyze
scanner: Python 2 and sslyze, ideally installed withpyenv
viapip install sslyze
.pageload
scanner: Node and phantomas, installed through npm.
Setting tool paths
By default, domain-scan will expect the paths to any executables to be on the system PATH.
If you need to point it to a local directory instead, you'll need to set environment variables to override this.
You can set environment variables in a variety of ways -- this tool's developers use autoenv
to manage environment variables with a .env
file.
However you set them:
-
Override the path to the
site-inspector
executable by setting theSITE_INSPECTOR_PATH
environment variable. -
Override the path to the
ssllabs-scan
executable by setting theSSLLABS_PATH
environment variable. -
Override the path to the
sslyze.py
executable by setting theSSLYZE_PATH
environment variable. An env var ofPYENV_VERSION=2.7.11
is passed by default, override version withSSLYZE_PYENV
. -
Override the path to the
phantomas
executable by setting thePHANTOMAS_PATH
environment variable.
Usage
Scan a domain. You must specify at least one "scanner" with --scan
.
./scan whitehouse.gov --scan=inspect
Scan a list of domains from a CSV. The CSV's header row will be ignored if the first cell starts with "Domain" (case-insensitive).
./scan domains.csv --scan=inspect
Run multiple scanners on each domain:
./scan whitehouse.gov --scan=inspect,tls
Parallelization
It's important to understand that scans run in parallel by default, and so the order of result data is unpredictable.
By default, each scanner will run up to 10 parallel tasks, which you can override with --workers
.
Some scanners may limit this. For example, the tls
scanner, which hits the SSL Labs API, maxes out at 5 tasks at once (which cannot be overridden with --workers
).
To disable this and run sequentially through each domain (1 worker), use --serial
.
Parallelization will also cause the resulting domains to be written in an unpredictable order. If the row order is important to you, disable parallelization, or use the --sort
parameter to sort the resulting CSVs once the scans have completed. (Note: Using --sort
will cause the entire dataset to be read into memory.)
Options
Scanners:
inspect
- HTTP/HTTPS/HSTS configuration.pshtt
- HTTP/HTTPS/HSTS configuration with the python-onlypshtt
tool.tls
- TLS configuration, using the SSL Labs API.sslyze
- TLS configuration, using the localsslyze
command line tool.analytics
- Participation in an analytics program.pageload
- Page load and rendering metrics.a11y
- Accessibility data with thepa11y
CLI tool via AWS Lambda (requires an AWS account and some additional setup, described further down this document).
General options:
--scan
- Required. Comma-separated names of one or more scanners.--sort
- Sort result CSVs by domain name, alphabetically. (Note: this causes the entire dataset to be read into memory.)--serial
- Disable parallelization, force each task to be done simultaneously. Helpful for testing and debugging.--debug
- Print out more stuff. Useful with--serial
.--workers
- Limit parallel threads per-scanner to a number.--output
- Where to output thecache/
andresults/
directories. Defaults to./
.--force
- Ignore cached data and force scans to hit the network. For thetls
scanner, this also tells SSL Labs to ignore its server-side cache.--suffix
- Add a suffix to all input domains. For example, a--suffix
ofvirginia.gov
will add.virginia.gov
to the end of all input domains.
Scanner-specific options
--analytics
- For theanalytics
scanner. Point this to either a file or a URL that contains a CSV of participating domains.
Output
All output files are placed into cache/
and results/
directories, whose location defaults to the current directory (./
). Override the output home with --output
.
- Cached full scan data about each domain is saved in the
cache/
directory, named after each scan and each domain, in JSON.
Example: cache/inspect/whitehouse.gov.json
- Formal output data in CSV form about all domains are saved in the
results/
directory in CSV form, named after each scan.
Example: results/inspect.csv
You can override the output directory by specifying --output
.
It's possible for scans to save multiple CSV rows per-domain. For example, the tls
scan may have a row with details for each detected TLS "endpoint".
- Scan metadata with the start time, end time, and scan command will be placed in the
results/
directory asmeta.json
.
Example: results/meta.json
Using with Docker
If using Docker Compose, it is as simple as cloning this GitHub repository and running:
docker-compose up
Then to scan, prefix commands with docker-compose run
, like:
docker-compose run scan <domain> --scan=<scanner>
Gathering hostnames
This tool also includes a facility for gathering domain names that end in a given suffix (e.g. .gov
) from various sources.
By default, only fetches third-level and higher domains (excluding second-level domains).
Usage:
./gather [source] [options]
Where source is one of:
censys
- Walks the Censys.io API, which has hostnames gathered from observed certificates. Censys provides certificates observed from a nightly zmap scan of the IPv4 space, as well as certificates published to public Certificate Transparency logs.url
- Given a path to a CSV, reads it and applies deduping and filtering logic. Its only option is--url
, which can be a URL (starts withhttp:
orhttps:
) or a local path.
General options:
--suffix
: Required. suffix to filter on (e.g..gov
)--parents
: A path or URL to a CSV whose first column is second-level domains. Any subdomain not contained within these second-level domains will be excluded.--include-parents
: Include second-level domains. (Defaults to false.)--debug
: display extra output
censys
: the Censys.io API
To configure, set two environment variables from your Censys account page:
CENSYS_UID
: Your Censys API ID.CENSYS_API_KEY
: Your Censys secret.
Options:
--start
: Page number to start on (defaults to1
)--end
: Page number to end on (defaults to value of--start
)--delay
: Sleep between pages, to meet API limits. Defaults to 5s. If you have researcher access, shorten to 2s.
Example:
Find .gov
certificates in the first 2 pages of Censys API results, waiting 5 seconds between pages:
./gather censys --suffix=.gov --start=1 --end=2 --delay=5
a11y setup
Because scanning 1,000+ domains with pa11y
takes a prohibitively long time, we're relying on AWS Lambda to provide parallelization.
This requires:
- An AWS account with access to Lambda
- A
pa11y-lambda
function (follow the instructions here).
Once those are set up, copy the .env.example
file, rename it .env
and fill in the following values:
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
AWS_REGION_NAME
(us-east-1
should work fine)AWS_LAMBDA_PA11Y_FUNCTION_NAME
(whatever you ended up naming the Lambda function)
A brief note on redirects:
For the accessibility scans we're running at 18F, we're using the inspect
scanner to follow redirects before the accessibility scan runs. Pulse.cio.gov is set up to show accessibility scans for live, non-redirecting sites. For example, if aaa.gov redirects to bbb.gov, we will show results for bbb.gov on the site, but not aaa.gov.
However, if you want to include results for redirecting site, note the following. For example, if aaa.gov redirects to bbb.gov, pa11y
will run against bbb.gov (but the result will be recorded for aaa.gov).
In order to get the benefits of the inspect
scanner, all a11y
scans must include it. For example, to scan gsa.gov:
./scan gsa.gov --scanner=inspect,a11y
Because of domain-scan
's caching, all the results of an inspect
scan will be saved in the cache/inspect
folder, and probably does not need to be re-run for every single ally
scan.
Public domain
This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:
This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.
All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.