Satan: double-edged sword

Author

Ram, Prabhu ; Rand, Douglas K.

Author_Institution

North Dakota Univ., Grand Forks, ND, USA

Volume

28

Issue

6

fYear

1995

fDate

6/1/1995 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

82

Lastpage

83

Abstract

Who can resist the allure of free software tools-especially software tools designed to do something as important as detect network vulnerabilities? As you might suspect, anything free generally carries a hidden price tag. Security Administrator Tools for Analyzing Networks (Satan) was released as freeware on April 5, 1995 (April 4 on many popular anonymous ftp sites). Developed by Dan Farmer (formerly employed by Silicon Graphics Inc. and now at Sun Microsystems) and Wietse Venema (Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands), it was designed to detect security vulnerabilities in any computer on the Internet. Satan can help discover the relative security issues inherent in your own network as well as security faults on networks outside your administrative domain. To be able to detect vulnerabilities, Satan would have to be run as super user on a Unix system, but with the wide availability of Unix lookalikes on PCs (such as Linux and freeBSD), root execution is not a limiting factor

Keywords

Internet; computer crime; internetworking; program diagnostics; security of data; Internet; Satan; Security Administrator Tools for Analyzing Networks; Unix lookalikes; Unix system; free software tools; network vulnerabilities; root execution; security faults; security issues; security vulnerabilities; super user; Computer graphics; Computer security; Internet; Linux; Personal communication networks; Resists; Silicon; Software design; Software tools; Sun;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computer

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9162

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/2.392775

Filename

392775