Christopher Bennett, AbdelRahman Abdou, and Paul C. van Oorschot (School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Canada)

Engines that scan Internet-connected devices allow for fast retrieval of useful information regarding said devices, and their running services. Examples of such engines include Censys and Shodan. We present a snapshot of our in-progress effort towards the characterization and systematic evaluation of such engines, herein focusing on results obtained from an empirical study that sheds light on several aspects. These include: the freshness of a result obtained from querying Censys and Shodan, the resources they consume from the scanned devices, and several interesting operational differences between engines observed from the network edge. Preliminary results confirm that the information retrieved from both engines can reflect updates within 24 hours, which aligns with implicit usage expectations in recent literature. The results also suggest that the consumed resources appear insignificant for common Internet applications, e.g., one full application-layer connection (banner grab) per port, per day. Results so far highlight the value of such engines to the research community

View More Papers

Differentially Private Health Tokens for Estimating COVID-19 Risk

David Butler, Chris Hicks, James Bell, Carsten Maple, and Jon Crowcroft (The Alan Turing Institute)

Read More

FARE: Enabling Fine-grained Attack Categorization under Low-quality Labeled Data

Junjie Liang (The Pennsylvania State University), Wenbo Guo (The Pennsylvania State University), Tongbo Luo (Robinhood), Vasant Honavar (The Pennsylvania State...

Read More

RandRunner: Distributed Randomness from Trapdoor VDFs with Strong Uniqueness

Philipp Schindler (SBA Research), Aljosha Judmayer (SBA Research), Markus Hittmeir (SBA Research), Nicholas Stifter (SBA Research, TU Wien), Edgar Weippl...

Read More