Cycle 9
- Course: CSC842 Security Tool Development
- Developer: Dylan Johnson
- Language: C
- Scope: Offensive Security/Penetration Testing/Defensive Security/Networking
A C program to scan TCP ports on a given host. Useful for both offensive and defensive use cases. On the offensive side, it can be used to find open ports during the enumeration phase of a pentest, checking what ports are open that could potentially be running vulnerable services. On the defensive side, it can help a network administrator understand what things are running on the network, so they can start to determine what services could be removed/are unnecessary.
pscan is able to take command line user input in the following format:
./pscan <host> <startPort> - <endPort>
<host> is an IP address from 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255
<startPort> is a port from 1 - 65535
<endPort> is a port starting at or equal to <startPort>
pscan then will loop through the port range provided and make a TCP socket connection to verify if the port is open or closed. The results are displayed at the end.
The primary function of this software is to determine the open ports on a given host.
Functionality should be added to check the status of UDP ports as well. Additionally, the ability to determine a specific service or state the commonly found service on given port should be added. Finally, rewriting the program to more quickly scan large amounts of ports/hosts would be ideal. At the moment, the program makes a full TCP connection to each port, and can take some time.