On Tue, 10 May 1994, Tom Fitzgerald wrote: > do, and COPS already has lots of useful name-recognition. Second, Gene > Spafford mentioned that he had someone already working on something like > this, so I'd be careful not to duplicate effort Don't forget about SATAN (whenever it will be publicly released). From Appendix A of Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema's paper - _Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into it_: Appendix A: SATAN (Security Analysis Tool for Auditing Networks) Originally conceived some years ago, SATAN is actually the prototype of a much larger and more comprehensive vision of a security tool. In its current incarnation, SATAN remotely probes and reports various bugs and weaknesses in network services and windowing systems, as well as detailing as much generally useful information as possible about the target(s). It then processes the data with a crude filter and what might be termed an expert system to generate the final security analysis. While not particularly fast, it is extremely modular and easy to modify. SATAN consists of several sub-programs, each of which is an executable file (perl, shell, compiled C binary, whatever) that tests a host for a given potential weakness. Adding further test programs is as simple as putting an executable into the main directory with the extension ".sat"; the driver program will automatically execute it. The driver generates "live" targets), and then executes each of the programs over each of the targets. A data filtering/interpreting program then analyzes the output, and lastly a reporting program digests everything into a more readable format. The entire package, including source code and documentation, will be made freely available to the public, via anonymous ftp and by posting it to one of the numerous source code groups on the Usenet. - Oliver