Operating system identification with Scapy

There is a wide range of techniques that can be used to attempt to fingerprint the operating system of a device you are communicating with. Truly effective operating system identification utilities are robust and employ a large number of techniques to factor into their analysis. However, Scapy can be used to analyze any of these factors individually. This specific recipe will demonstrate how to perform OS identification with Scapy by examining the returned TTL values.

Getting ready

To use Scapy to identify discrepancies in TTL responses, you will need to have both a remote system that is running a Linux/Unix operating system and a remote system that is running a Windows operating system available for analysis. In the examples provided, an installation of Metasploitable2 and an installation of Windows XP are used. For more information on setting up systems in a local lab environment, refer to the Installing Metasploitable2 and Installing Windows Server...