Tag Archives: SSH

Scanvus – my open source Vulnerability Scanner for Linux hosts and Docker images

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Scanvus – my open source Vulnerability Scanner for Linux hosts and Docker images. Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf 22 Vulnerability Management conference, vmconf.pw. I will be talking about my open source project Scanvus. This project is already a year old and I use it almost every day.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239100

Scanvus (Simple Credentialed Authenticated Network VUlnerability Scanner) is a vulnerability scanner for Linux. Currently for Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RedHat, Oracle Linux and Alpine distributions. But in general for any Linux distribution supported by the Vulners Linux API. The purpose of this utility is to get a list of packages and Linux distribution version from some source, make a request to an external vulnerabililty detection API (only Vulners Linux API is currently supported), and show the vulnerability report.

Scanvus can show vulnerabilities for

  • localhost
  • remote host via SSH
  • docker image
  • inventory file of a certain format

This utility greatly simplifies Linux infrastructure auditing. And besides, this is a project in which I can try to implement my ideas on vulnerability detection.

Example of output

For all targets the output is the same. It contains information about the target and the type of check. Then information about the OS version and the number of Linux packages. And finally, the actual information about vulnerabilities: how many vulnerabilities were found and the criticality levels of these vulnerabilities. The table shows the criticality level, bulletin ID, CVE list for the bulletin, and a comparison of the invulnerable fixed package version with the actual installed version.

This report is not the only way to present results. You can optionally export the results to JSON (OS inventory data, raw vulnerability data from Vulners Linux API or processed vulnerability data).

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How to fix “Nessus failed to load the SSH private key” error?

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How to fix “Nessus failed to load the SSH private key” error? If you are using Nessus to scan Linux hosts and authenticate by key, you may encounter this problem.

You have generated the keys correctly, placed the public key on a remote server. You can connect to this server using the private key.

ssh -p22 -i private_key user@server.corporation.com

But when scanning with Nessus, you get weird errors in the various plugin outputs:

  • Target Credential Status by Authentication Protocol – Failure for Provided Credentials
  • Nessus failed to load the SSH private key. Is the associated passphrase correct?
  • Failed to parse the given key information.
  • Unable to login to remote host with supplied credential sets.

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Vulnerability Management at Tinkoff Fintech School

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Vulnerability Management at Tinkoff Fintech School. In the last three weeks, I participated in Tinkoff Fintech School – educational program for university students. Together with my colleagues, we prepared a three-month practical Information Security course: 1 lecture per week with tests and home tasks.

Each lecture is given by a member of our security team, specialized in one of the following modules: Vulnerability Management, Application Security, Infrastructure Security, Network Security, Virtualization Security, Banking Systems Security, Blue & Red-teaming, etc.

Vulnerability Management at Tinkoff Fintech School

The course is still ongoing, but my Vulnerability Management module is over. Therefore, I want to share my impressions and some statistics.

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Making Expect scripts for SSH Authentication and Privilege Elevation

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Making Expect scripts for SSH Authentication and Privilege Elevation. Expect can help you to automate interactive console applications. For example, expect script can go to some Linux host via SSH with password authentication, make additional authentication procedures (su, sudo) to elevate privileges and execute some commands. Like Vulnerability and Compliance management products do during the active Linux scanning, right? 🙂 For example you can get the list of installed packages and make Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner.

Expect SSH exec

Actually, the tool is pretty old. It was presented more than 20 years ago! And perhaps now it makes more sense to use python scripts, for example paramiko with paramiko-expect. Or even use some software provisioning tool, like Ansible. But my fun was in creating (generating?) a small old-school scripts that could be sent to any remote host (with expect installed) to gather information from the accessible hosts.

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Vulchain scan workflow and search queries

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Vulchain scan workflow and search queries. This post will be about my Vulnerability Scanner project – Vulchain. Recently I’ve spent couple of my weekends almost exclusively on coding: refactoring the scan engine, creating API and GUI.

Vulchain scan workflow and search queries

I was doing it because of the conferences, where I will be speaking soon:

Pretty intense schedule for a guy who spends most of his time in PyCharm and Linux console. 😉 Very excited! So, it seemed right to add a couple of slides about my project and show that something is already working.

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Dealing with Nessus logs

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Dealing with Nessus logs. Debugging Nessus scans is a very interesting topic. And it is not very well described even in Tenable University course. It become especially interesting when you see strange network errors in the scan results. Let’s see how we can troubleshoot Nessus scans without sending Nessus DB files to Tenable  (which is, of course, the default way 😉 ).

Nessus Logs

Default logging

Let’s see default Nessus logs. I cleared log nessusd.messages file to have only logs of the latest scan:

# echo "" > /opt/nessus/var/nessus/logs/nessusd.messages

and restarted Nessus:

# /bin/systemctl start nessusd.service

I scan only one host (test-linux-host01, 192.168.56.12) with the Advanced scan profile. No default settings was set.

As you can see from the cpe report, it’s typical Linux host with ssh server:

typical Linux host with ssh

What’s in the logs?

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SSH, SFTP, public key authentication and python

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SSH, SFTP, public key authentication and python. SFTP is a simple and fairly reliable way to share the information within the organization. Let’s look at the situation when you need to pick up some files from a remote host with authorization by public key. And after that, let’s see how to use it with in python.

ssh sftp python

Moreover, let’s see how to work with SSH using python and execute any commands on the remote host. For example. if we need it to collect versions of installed packages and a version Linux distribution for further vulnerability analysis (see “Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner“). 😉

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