Operating System Fingerprinting Technique

OS fingerprinting: os fingerprinting refers to detection of target computer operation system.

Since different operating system responds differently to the same kind of ICMP message it is very important for an attacker to determine the exact operating system running on target system.

Also attacker can carry out attacks by taking over the vulnerabilities/bugs found in that particular operating system.

There are four areas that we will look at to determine the operating system.

1. TTL – what the operating system sets the time to live on the outbound packet.

2. Window size – what the operating system sets the window size at.

3. DF – does the operating system set the don’t fragment bit.

     4. TOS – does the operating system set the type of service and if so at what.

There are two different types of OS fingerprinting technique –

Active OS Fingerprinting – remote active operating system fingerprinting is the process of actively determining a targeted network nods underlying operating system by probing the targeted system with several packets and examining the response or lack thereof received?

      The traditional approach is to examine the TCP/IP stack behavior (IP, TCP, UDP and ICMP protocols)  

      of a targeted network element when probed with several legitimate and malformed packets.

 

Passive OS fingerprinting- passive fingerprinting is based on sniffer traces from the remote system. Instead of actively querying the remote system all you need to do is capture packets you can determine the operation system of the remote host. 

Just like in active fingerprinting passive fingerprinting is based on the principle that every operation systems IP stack has its own idiosyncrasies. By analyzing sniffer traces and identifying these differences you may be able determine the operating system of the remote host.