Snap: Robust Tool for Internet-wide Operating System Fingerprinting

Abstract

Different approaches have been developed for TCP/IP fingerprinting, but none of these approaches is suited for Internet-wide fingerprinting. In this work, we develop approaches that rigorously tackle the issue of noise and packet loss while carrying out Internet-wide fingerprinting. We then carry out an Internet-wide scan to determine the distribution of different operating systems on the Internet. The results of our scan indicate that there are approximately 8.9 million publicly accessible web-servers on the Internet running Linux, while there are nearly 9.6 million web-servers with different embedded operating systems.