Re: studies/papers/etc. on getting best results w. nmap?

["^..^" <zenfish () gmail com>]

I have read the book.  It's a fine work, and does have some tips on how to better gain information (stateful vs. 
stateless, source port manipulation, etc., etc), but it doesn't have anything like how much better these might be in 
terms of %'ages or surveys or what is better except in very general terms that might be interpreted by an expert; the 
little case studies (e.g. the IP ID trick, which basically says "start by using your experience as someone who has a 
deep knowledge of packets and networks") are marvelous for one-offs or analyzing specific scans, but not as a general 
rule or something to rely on when looking at large data sets.  It also doesn't have any specific vendor differences 
that I can recall, and certainly not a survey of them.  Nor does it speak about the differences of the platform you're 
scanning from and the effects on nmap itself.

So no, I don't believe the book is any help to answering any of my questions.

I was asking if anyone had any #'s/statistics/etc on whether or not certain things mattered, not what the certain 
things were.  If no one has ever done a study on it, fine, but I'm not looking for one-off tricks of analysis that may 
or may not be a good fit.

--d

^..^

On Sep 3, 2012, at 6:04 PM, "DePriest, Jason R." <jrdepriest () gmail com> wrote:

> Fyodor's book Nmap Network Scannings has plenty of examples and
> specifically talks about scanning through firewalls.
>
> http://nmap.org/book/
>
> Give it a look.
>
> -Jason
>
> On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 5:02 PM, ^..^ <> wrote:
> > Hey folks -
> >
> > Have there been any studies done on the accuracy of nmap, or ways to improve the same?  I've done a bit of searching 
> > but certain types of things are harder to find than others, and nmap shows up everywhere for just about any search 
> > term ;)  If I've missed anything obvious, my apologies, an RTFM or link would be awesome.
> >
> > I'm on a project where many of the targets are probably behind firewalls/network devices, and I've 3 very basic q's. 
> >   I'd love to be pointed at any discussions or papers on any of theem (or feel free to speak up with your own 
> > opinions ;)   As a test I've started assigning weights to various results (e.g. closed is more closed than 
> > filtered), and it's showing at least some promise.
> >
> > 1) Any references on whether closed (or other results) are more open/closed than all the various outputs you can get 
> > - e.g. filtered, close|filtered, etcetera.
> >
> > 2) And are there any archives/talks/papers/DBs about what individual routers/fw implementations tend to return?  
> > E.g. "cisco's tend to return closed|filtered where junipers tend to use "open|filtered" or anything?
> >
> > 3) Purely based on my own tests over the years I believe pretty strongly that I get different results when scanning 
> > from different OS's (e.g. scanning from Linux vs. OS X, with all other factors taken under consideration), and some 
> > scans are faster - at times substantially so - on one vs. the other.  Are some OS's (and/or versions within, aka 64 
> > vs. 32 bit, or using different compilers, having more memory, whatever) seen as better nmap scanners than others?  
> > It'd be nice to be able to optimize for nmap scanning, or even some types of scanning.  If there were a place to 
> > dump results of various sorts of scans I'd certainly contribute my own timings and such.   (I think this question is 
> > independent of the performance tips @ http://nmap.org/book/man-performance.html, but presumably some options there 
> > work better in some situations as well.)
> >
> > Thanks for all the hard work on nmap!
> >
> > dan
> >
> > ^..^
> >
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