Tag Archives: Vulners Audit

Vulchain Scanner: 5 basic principles

New Year holidays in Russia lasts 10 days this year! Isn’t it an excellent opportunity to start a new project? So, I decided to make my own active network vulnerability scanner – Vulchain.

Why? Well, first of all, it’s fun. You can make the architecture from scratch, see the difficulties invisible from the user side and try something new in software development as well.

Vulchain modular scanner

Basic principles of the project. This is not a dogma, but rather a general direction.

  1. Data layers. I would like to have this independent sets of data:
    • Raw data collections
    • Software versions detected from the raw data
    • Vulnerabilities detected from the software versions
    • Exploitability assessment data for the detected vulnerabilities
  2. Modularity. Most of functionality will be performed by the independent modules which read some data from one data level, and create some data on other data level.
  3. Transparency. Data is stored constantly on the all levels. You can easily figure out how the data was  processed, track the errors and modify modules.
  4. Neutrality. All modules are independent and easily replaceable. For example:
  5. Rationality. If it is possible to use some security utility, service or product, we will integrate with them, rather than writing our own analogue. We spend resources only on what will give us the maximum profit at a minimum of costs. 😉

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New Vulners.com services for Linux Security Audit and Vulnerability Alerting

Upd. This post is out of date! Check out “Vulners Linux Audit API for Host Vulnerability Detection: Manual Auditing, Python Scripting and Licensing” from 2021.

A few weeks ago I was describing how to perform Linux Vulnerability Assessment without a Vulnerability Scanner. I also wrote in “Vulnerability scanners: a view from the vendor and end user side” that vulnerability scanning is not rocket science and it is easy to make your own scanner for vulnerabilities for a particular OS. Especially it is a popular Linux Distribution.

But. It’s one thing to write that you can do it, and another thing to develop a script for home use, and quite another thing to make a publicly available and efficient service…

Vulners Team guys have actually created such free Linux Vulnerability Audit service!

Linux Vulnerability Audit Service

First of all, they made a GUI where you can specify OS version (usually it is in the /etc/os-release file), list of packages installed on the host and get the list of vulnerabilities.

For example, here are the vulnerabilities for my Ubuntu Laptop, which I update frequently:

Ubuntu Vulners Linux Audit Input

One vulnerability was found:

Ubuntu Vulners Linux Audit Results

But GUI is good for demonstration. In real life, you can use Vulners Audit API. It will return list of vulnerabilities in JSON.

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