Book Image

Practical Network Scanning

By : Ajay Singh Chauhan
Book Image

Practical Network Scanning

By: Ajay Singh Chauhan

Overview of this book

Network scanning is the process of assessing a network to identify an active host network; same methods can be used by an attacker or network administrator for security assessment. This procedure plays a vital role in risk assessment programs or while preparing a security plan for your organization. Practical Network Scanning starts with the concept of network scanning and how organizations can benefit from it. Then, going forward, we delve into the different scanning steps, such as service detection, firewall detection, TCP/IP port detection, and OS detection. We also implement these concepts using a few of the most prominent tools on the market, such as Nessus and Nmap. In the concluding chapters, we prepare a complete vulnerability assessment plan for your organization. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience in performing network scanning using different tools and in choosing the best tools for your system.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

OpenSSL


OpenSSL is an open source project that consists of a cryptographic library and an SSL toolkit.

According to the project's website itself, the OpenSSL Project is:

"A collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols as well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library. The project is managed by a worldwide community of volunteers that use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop the OpenSSL toolkit and its related documentation."

OpenSSL libraries can be used to create a certificate request (CSR), a self-signed certificate and even to issue a certificate as a CA. If you are running a small or corporate organization  and have the ability to import a root trust certificate to all computer systems, you can become your own CA and issue certificates yourself.

For example, I will be using my Ubuntu server. This is an old release but of course...