Understanding passive and active service discovery

Increasingly, network operators do not directly operate computers on their network, yet are responsible for assessing network vulnerabilities to ensure compliance with policies about information disclosure, and tracking services that affect provisioning. Thus, with decentralized network management, service discovery becomes an important part of maintaining and protecting computer networks. We explore two approaches to service discovery: active probing and passive monitoring. Active probing finds all services currently on the network, except services temporarily unavailable or hidden by firewalls; however, it is often too invasive, especially if used across administrative boundaries. Passive monitoring can find transient services, but misses services that are idle. We compare the accuracy of passive and active approaches to service discovery and show that they are complimentary, highlighting the need for multiple active scans coupled with long-duration passive monitoring. We find p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Genevieve Bartlett, John S. Heidemann, Christos Papadopoulos
• Keywords: Active Probing, IMC 2007, Internet Technology, Passive Monitoring, Service Discovery