Dist-Detect is an active commandline scanner to detect the Linux or Unix distribution running on a remote host by looking at the banners or responses of typical Unix network services.

Dist-Detect is currently work in progress. For now only the SSH service is supported and works already quite well in detecting Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu, Raspbian, etc.), but HTTP/HTTPS, DNS (dig version.bind ch txt +short @<IP>) and SMTP might be a good data source as well.

Quickly get an idea …

• … of the Linux/BSD/Unix distribution and distribution release of a remote system …

• … if the admin applies security updates regularily …

• … if the remote system is running an EoL release …

… just by looking at the responses of a few common network services (or at Shodan.io), i.e. very fast.

This is especially useful in heterogenous networks (e.g. with BYOD or many self-managed machines) as common in academia, data-centers with a lot of internet-facing, rented servers/racks, etc.

• If the scanner finds something bad, it's quite sure → nearly no False Positives
• Unknown or unclear versions stay unknown or unclear → will contain False Negatives

SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_7.4p1 Debian-10+deb9u4

The 7.4p1 Debian as well as the deb9 clearly show that this is a Debian 9 Stretch. From the banner you can determine the according package version to be 1:7.4p1-10+deb9u4.

Now you can check against the version in the Debian 9 Stretch (security) repositories (e.g. in the Debian Package Tracker if it's the latest one (it's not as of this writing) and hence if OpenSSH security updates as provided by Debian have been applied.

This tools tries to automate this kind of analysis and is hence allowing to scan your whole network quickly for obviously outdated machines. I call this Low Hanging Fruits Scanning.

As of now, this work in progress.

The inital prototype used hardcoded (and handcoded :-) regular expression (which were outdated quite quickly).

Currently the package repositories of Debian, Ubuntu and Raspbian are checked for the current OpenSSH versions and then the result is stored in an SQLite database. This database is then queried when translating OpenSSH banners into package versions and uptodateness information.

Especially the database schema will likely still change without migration path between each incarnation at the current stage of development. (But since the database can be easily regenerated, this should be no real issue.)

Includes (static) heuristics to also detect an endlessh tarpit.

There are scripts which scan hosts themselves (IPv4 as well as IPv6) and there's a script which queries Shodan.io's API. (The latter requires a free account there and an API key stored in ~/.shodan/api_key as the officialy Shodan Python library does.)

TL;DR: apt install libclass-c3-perl libdpkg-perl libdpkg-parse-perl libfile-touch-perl libio-socket-inet6-perl libmojolicious-perl libmojo-sqlite-perl libnet-cidr-set-perl libnet-dns-perl libparams-validate-perl libtry-tiny-perl libyaml-perl libdata-validate-ip-perl

Dist-Detect is written in Perl (5.14 or a higher 5.x version) and requires the following non-core Perl modules (CPAN distributions and Debian packages names in parentheses):

• Class::C3 (Class-C3, libclass-c3-perl)

• Data::Validate::IP (Data-Validate-IP, libdata-validate-ip-perl)

• Dpkg::Compression::FileHandle and Dpkg::Version (Dpkg, libdpkg-perl)

• DPKG::Parse::Packages (DPKG-Parse, libdpkg-parse-perl)

• File::Touch (File-Touch, libfile-touch-perl)

• IO::Socket::INET6 (IO-Socket-INET6, libio-socket-inet6-perl)

• Mojo::Collection, Mojo::Date, Mojo::File, Mojo::UserAgent and many more Mojo::* indirectly, like Mojo::JSON (Mojolicious, libmojolicious-perl)

• Mojo::SQLite (Mojo-SQLite, libmojo-sqlite-perl¹)

• Net::CIDR::Set (Net-CIDR-Set, libnet-cidr-set-perl¹)

• Net::DNS (Net-DNS, libnet-dns-perl)

• Params::Validate (Params-Validate, libparams-validate-perl)

• Try::Tiny (Try-Tiny, libtry-tiny-perl)

• YAML::Any (YAML, libyaml-perl)

¹) Only available since Debian 10 Buster.

None yet. Use it just from the checked out git repository by calling the scripts in bin/ with their relative or full path.

• Consistent tags: NoSecUpd vs NO-UPD

• Add package list downloaders and scrapers for CentOS, openSUSE and macOS.

• Distinguish between repos where SSH signatures changes often (active security mirrors of Debian and derivatives) and where they change seldomly (old-releases.ubuntu.com / archive.debian.org).

• Make output more human readable. Maybe use a commandline switch to produce either machine or human readable output. The human readable output could be still machine readable by e.g. using YAML instead of purely line-based formats.

• Debian Jessie is at the moment available on the normal mirrors and in the historical archive and hence gets flagged EOL even if that might be wrong depending on the (not easily detectable) architecture. Handle this better.

The bin/newest-openssh-version-on-*.pl scripts are a good start for that.

If e.g. the SSH banner was SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_7.4, this could be (at least) a RHEL 7.4 or higher, or a macOS 10.12.4 to 10.12.6. So other protocols should add more confidence or limit the list of possible operating systems and distributions.

$ HEAD http://ssh-was-ambiguous/
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: […]
Server: Apache/2.4.6 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)

Here, port 80 told us the distribution even though the SSH banner was ambiguous.

HEAD http://somecentos6/
200 OK
Date: […]
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)

$ echo QUIT | nc mymailserver 25
220 mymailserver ESMTP Postfix (Debian/GNU)
221 2.0.0 Bye
$ echo QUIT | nc afriendsmailserver 25
220-afriendsmailserver ESMTP Proxmox
221 2.0.0 Bye
$ echo QUIT | nc anothermailserver 25
220 anothermailserver ESMTP Exim 4.86_2 Ubuntu Thu, 10 Oct 2019 17:35:32 +0200
221 anothermailserver closing connection

We often don't get the version, but at least the Linux distribution. Again helpful if the SSH banner is ambiguous.

$ dig +short -t txt -c chaos version.bind @ams.sns-pb.isc.org
"9.9.7-P2"
$ dig +short version.bind CH TXT @a.iana-servers.net
"Knot DNS 2.6.3"
 dig +short version.bind CH TXT @ns.nlnetlabs.nl
"NSD 4.2.2"
$ dig +short version.bind CH TXT oneofmydnsservers
"9.9.5-9+deb8u18-Debian"
$ dig +short version.bind CH TXT somerhel7
"9.11.4-P2-RedHat-9.11.4-9.P2.el7"
$ dig +short version.bind CH TXT anotherrhel7
"9.9.4-RedHat-9.9.4-74.el7_6.2"
$ dig version.bind ch txt +short @127.0.0.1
"unbound 1.9.4"
$ dig version.bind ch txt +short @192.168.1.1
"dnsmasq-2.78"

Please note that fpdns is about as (un)suitable as nmap for this purpose (but much faster): It does real fingerprinting and not evaluating the actual data it can retrieve from a DNS server.

An exception would be cases like these:

$ dig +short version.bind CH TXT @8.8.8.8
$ dig +short version.bind CH TXT @a.ns.nic.cz
$ dig +short version.bind CH TXT @ns2.switch.ch
"contact [email protected]"
$ dig +short version.bind CH TXT @a.nic.de
"ns-1.de.nl1.bind"

• Also store results and scan dates in a database.

• Someone suggested to also look at SIP, NTP, MDNS (Synology devices seem to be quite chatty) and SSDP ports.

• Parse package changelogs for existing versions.

• Add optional scanning backends.

  • SSH:
    • scanssh,
    • ZMap's ZGrab with its "x/crypto SSH scanner" plugin.
  • Any service which provides exact Linux kernel versions, like open Redis servers. ;-)
  • Generic TCP:
    • pnscan,
    • masscan,
    • ZMap?
    • pf_ring?
  • Maybe further online ressources besides Shodan.io?

• Ping (probably with fping or ZMap) before scan.

• Integrate scanning via Tor.

  • Just using torify works, but causes:
    • error messages on STDERR
    • long timeouts (minutes, i.e. very slow scanning)
    • non-working DNS PTR lookup (should then use tor-resolve -x internally)

• Report a "no route to host" as potentially being a RedHat, especially if other ports are reachable.

• Maybe use https://repology.org/api and https://repology.org/project/openssh/versions instead of or in addition to scraping package lists. Probably filter returned list to only use these package names:

  • openssh
  • openssh-server
  • openssh-portable The following list is questionable as they're patched versions which may lag behind the unpatched version:
  • openssh-krb5 (SlackBuilds)
  • openssh-gssapi (AUR)
  • openssh-multiple-bindaddress (AUR)
  • openssh-with-hpn (nixpkgs)

• Another source might be Wikidata's OpenSSH entry and its JSON representation.

  • Probably less reliable than repology because likely only manual / crowd-sourced data updates.

• Add support for more Debian derivatives:

  • Supported derivatives ones like Trisquel, Linux Mint, and Kali Linux.
  • Live-CDs like Tails, Grml and Knoppix
  • Discontinued ones (you also want to detect them) like Tanglu

• Let the package list parser optionally generate rules from every banner of a non-up-to-date or end-of-life version for SNORT (and hence also Suricata) and/or Zeek (formerly known as Bro).

• Maybe also take the output of ssh-audit as a signature for an OS. Needs a collection of signatures, though.

• Maybe allow scanhost.pl to read scan targets from STDIN or use a configuration file for batch scans, too.

• Maybe use Data::Password or Data::Password::Entropy to better detect endlessh pre-banners.

• A way to detect that some Linux distribution is running inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Copyright 2019, Axel Beckert [email protected] and ETH Zurich.

Dist-Detect is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Dist-Detect is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Dist-Detect. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

The guess_who_tux logo is derived from the Tux logo which is under Public Domain and inspired by the "Guess Who" t-shirts of Grazer Linuxtage 2013.

• Jakob Dhondt for the project name suggestion.
• The SWITCH Open Source Security Tools Hackathon 2019 for providing the right atmosphere to get the project away from the Proof of Concept state. :-)

• More verbose slide deck (English) based on AsciiDoc and Slidy

• More verbose slide deck (German) based on AsciiDoc and Slidy

• OpenSSH Release Notes

• Dropbear Changes

• OpenSSH in the Debian Package Tracker

• Launchpad: OpenSSH package in Ubuntu (Overview)

• CertDepot: RHEL7 Changes between versions

• OpenSSH package of SuSE/openSUSE

• OpenSSH package of Fedora and its release history

• Open Source Code in use at Apple

• CVE-2018-15599: Known Affected Software Configurations

• Dropbear in the Debian Package Tracker

• Launchpad: Dropbear package in Ubuntu

• Dropbear package of SuSE/openSUSE (Only community packages?)

• Early Dropbear upstream .deb packages (and upstream source tar balls)

• Debian Bug #562048 explains how the DebianBanner patch came along

• ssh-version (probably too slow to be used as backend, more thought as small and simple commandline tool)

• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html-single/7.4_release_notes/#BZ1341754
• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html-single/7.1_release_notes/#idm140132757747728
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREE-4346