![[SATAN IMAGE]](satan.gif)
SATAN Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)SATAN Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
There are some technical reasons why SATAN is important - it
does do and detect things that weren't possible before,
at least by no other tools or methods that the authors knew about. It's
easy to use, and fills a gap that was only poorly covered by previous
software. However, the death of the Internet is not, and should not
be predicted.
Why doesn't it warn remote hosts that it is probing them?
This could be built into satan; the most reliable general solution
would be to send mail to the probed system (say, to "root" or "postmaster").
A beta-tester suggested that an entry could be written to the target's
syslog. Neither of the solutions are incredibly reliable. The
former relies on someone reading the mail and the account existing, as
well as having to deal with hundreds if not thousands of pieces of mail
that might go to machines that the user of SATAN controls. The latter
has several problems, first and foremost in that it depends on people
actually looking at the syslog records, and secondly that if an intruder
uses SATAN to break in, they will typically "flatten", modify, or simply
destroy such records. Finally, many systems don't run or have non-standard
syslog programs and quite a few filter out requests with packet filters,
so they would never see the warning.
Nonetheless, we'll probably be putting either or both of these as options in
the next release of SATAN.
What's the difference between it and COPS?
COPS is a host-based Un*x security auditing tool; that means you run it
on the host you wish to examine the security of. SATAN is a remote
network security auditing tool, which means it can report
on the security of any host OR network that has IP connectivity to where
you run the tool; you don't need an account or privileges on the remote
targets to report on them.
What's the difference between it and ISS and other remote scanners?
ISS, and any other remote auditing tool that we're aware of, scans a network
or remote host and then reports on any problems that it may find. While
SATAN does that as well, the inferencing, the web of trust that it
uncovers, the automatic probing of secondary targets, the rich reporting
schema with context sensitive hypertext links to the documentation, the
rich configurability, etc. all make SATAN different to what is currently
available.
What's a remote security auditing tool/probe/scanner?
This means it can report on the security of any host OR network that has
IP connectivity to where you run the tool; you don't need an account or
privileges on the remote targets to report on them.
I'm using a B/W monitor, and it's hard to
see the difference between red and black dots. What can I do?
The easiest thing to do is to just mv (or link or whatever) the
html/dots/whitedot.gif to html/dots/reddot.gif. That'll
give a much higher contrast and should be easier to read.
How can I change from one HTML browser (e.g. Mosaic,
Netscape, whatever) to another, without running reconfig or something?
Simply edit the file config/paths.pl. You'll see a line that
looks like:
$MOSAIC = "/usr/local/bin/netscape";
Change the path inside the parenthesis to point to wherever your
preferred browser is; for instance, if you want to use Mosaic, and it's
in /usr/bin/X11, you'd change the above line to:
$MOSAIC = "/usr/bin/X11/Mosaic";
SATAN saves data at regular intervals to its database files; the easiest
thing to do is to simply start it up again, with the same target and
probe levels. If SATAN has remembered anything, it will grind away for
awhile, finding out what it has seen before, and then resume on the targets
that it hasn't scanned.
How can I tell if anyone is running SATAN against
me?
CIAC wrote and is distrbuting something called
Courtney, but it is far from foolproof. It is very difficult
to detect the lighter SATAN scans; the heavier ones, however, are
typically best detected by running Wietse's tcpd wrappers and examining
the logs - a good tipoff is if many of your machines in the same area
log connections from the same remote site. Some of the SATAN probes
output a message to the console - if users report odd messages on their
console screen, take them seriously ;-)
{When is the port of/can you help me port/do
you have any information on porting} SATAN to MacOS/DOS/VMS/MVS/Whatever?
SATAN, at least on the server side, is heavily linked to Un*x and perl5.
While it might be possible to port SATAN to one of these other OS's (if
you can call them that! ;-)) would be fairly difficult and not something
that either one of us wants to touch with a ten foot (or ~ 3 meter) pole.
I see a lot of odd files that are appearing
on my system after running SATAN, such as /tmp/sh11318, tmp_file.1288,
etc. What's the deal?
SATAN uses perl extensively in it's tests; the .satan probes use such commands as:
open(FOO, "|program <<_EOF
some input
more input
_EOF");
This will leave a temporary file behind when SATAN determines that they
have run out of time and kill off the probe. Almost all temporary files
that are created at various time within the SATAN are deleted
automatically, but since the << files are created internally by the shell,
it is impossible for SATAN to know how to delete the files
that remain. Simply delete them, or create a cron job to
automatically sweep the /tmp directory for you.
There are several reasons why SATAN does not probe for all known bugs: