Categories: Forensics ToolsSecurity Tools

p0f – Passive Traffic Analysis OS Fingerprinting and Forensics Tool

P0f is an OS Fingerprinting and Forensics Tool that utilizes an array of sophisticated, purely passive traffic fingerprinting mechanisms to identify the players behind any incidental TCP/IP communications (often as little as a single normal SYN) without interfering in any way.

Version 3 is a complete rewrite of the original codebase, incorporating a significant number of improvements to network-level fingerprinting, and introducing the ability to reason about application-level payloads.

Learn: Computer Forensics & Cyber Crime Investigation: Using Open Source Tools

Some of p0f Forensics Tool capabilities include:

Highly scalable and extremely fast identification of the operating system and software on both endpoints of a vanilla TCP connection – especially in settings where NMap probes are blocked, too slow, unreliable, or would simply set off alarms.
Measurement of system uptime and network hookup, distance (including topology behind NAT or packet filters), user language preferences, and so on.
Automated detection of connection sharing / NAT, load balancing, and application-level proxying setups.
Detection of clients and servers that forge declarative statements such as X-Mailer or User-Agent.( Forensics Tool)

Common uses for p0f include reconnaissance during penetration tests; routine network monitoring; detection of unauthorized network interconnects in corporate environments; providing signals for abuse-prevention tools; and miscellanous forensics.

Step 1:

Start Kali and Open p0f 3.0 in Kali Tool List.

Kali Linux -> Forensics -> Network Forensics -> p0f.

Another Method to Open the tool ,type p0f -i eth0 -l

Step 2:

In this Forensics Tool, To Launch p0f use this comment root@kali#p0f -i -eth0

Use interface eth0 (-i eth0)

promiscuous mode (-p)

saving the results to a file (-o /tmp/p0f.log):

Step 3:

Open your Browser and Surf the Target Server ( Ex:www.google.com) .you will see the lively active connection in the p0f Forensics Tool window.

Once the connection is established your Client will communicate with the server. In the below image, p0f identifies the IP address. My Client IP (10.0.2.15) Established a Connection with the Target web server (52.26.140.68) with port number 443.

Here we got some valuable OS Fingerprint information. The client used the Linux Machine.

We can Test this with Different ClientOS.

Step 4 :

p0f for Forensics

The final test of the p0f Forensics Tool runs on our interface and does forensics on a compromised system or a system under attack.

My Kali system was connected to unknown IP ( 52.26.140.68 ) with port number 443.

In the screenshot above, it identifies as server OS running by Windows and 0 hops away.

We can see the connection Uptime 5 min since it has been established with the server.

I can see that my system connected from my port 53088 to its port 443 and that this server has been up for over 198 straight days.

Author : Michal Zalewski

You can follow us on Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook for daily Cybersecurity updates also you can check the Vulnerability Management Analysis to keep your self-updated