Research And Implementation Of Penetration Testing Based On Collaborative Control

As internet technology plays an increasingly important role in people’s life, network security is becoming increasingly more serious. To ensure security, network security assessment has been the research hotspot in the field of information security. However, among all the network security assessment technologies, penetration testing is the most common and most effective way. Hence, we are going to pay attention to researching the penetration testing in this thesis.Firstly, we make a comprehensive analysis and summary of all the current penetration testing technologies. And, we find that these existing methods could be characterized by low gathering efficient, difficult to process and target single. Tackling with these issues, we research on a novel penetration testing technology, collaborative control-based networking scanning and information utilization technology, by introducing the collaborative control theory. For network scanning, we focus on task statement, task breakdown, task distribution, task execution and other related core technologies which are based on the collaborative control technology. After gathering information in network scanning phase, during the next information processing phase, we first analysis all the gathered information, then generate the attack paths to the target network using path generation algorithm.Secondly, on the basis of all the above introduced techniques, we design and implement a system prototype, including collaborative control module, information gathering module, path generation module and penetration attacking module. In the collaborative control module, we apply task planning and task distribution based on Contract Network Protocol into the implementation of distribution and control, brings to higher efficient. In order to gather many different types of information, we use multiple scanning technologies, such as network topology discovery, hosts discovery, port scanning and vulnerability scanning, to work collaboratively. For each technology, we adopt different protocol or facility, like network topology discovery is based SNMP protocol, hosts discovery and port scanning are based on Nmap, vulnerability scanning is based on Nessus. For attack path generation, we employ an automatic path generation algorithm, whose input is the reachability matrix that can be obtained according to the gathered information, to get the path. After obtaining the attack path, we call vulnerability attack payload, which is realized on the foundation of the Metasploit framework, to finish the penetration attacking. Shortly thereafter, we will get a penetration testing report.Finally, we make an evaluation on this prototype from many different aspects. According to our evaluation results, we can conclude that our system has a higher degree automation, and can effective finish all the penetration testing procedure. Furthermore, it also performs efficient in the process of network scanning. Its value has been proved in the practical aspect.