Overview
This post will show how you can make a small and easy-to-use port scanner program written in Python. There are many ways of doing this with Python, and I’m going to do it using the built-in module Socket.
Sockets
The socket module in Python provides access to the BSD socket interface. It includes the socket class, for handling the actual data channel, and functions for network-related tasks such as converting a server’s name to an address and formatting data to be sent across the network.
Source Sockets are widely used on the Internet, as they are behind any kind of network communications done by your computer.
The INET sockets account for at least 99% of the sockets in use. The web browser’s that you use opens a socket and connects to the web server.
Any network communication goes through a socket.
For more reading about the socket module, please see the official documentation.
Socket functions
Before we get started with our sample program, let’s see some of the socket functions we are going to use.
Syntax for creating a socket sock = socket.socket (socket_family, socket_type) Creates a stream socket sock = socket.socket (socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) AF_INET Socket Family (here Address Family version 4 or IPv4) SOCK_STREAM Socket type TCP connections SOCK_DGRAM Socket type UDP connections Translate a host name to IPv4 address format gethostbyname("host") Translate a host name to IPv4 address format, extended interface socket.gethostbyname_ex("host") Get the fqdn (fully qualified domain name) socket.getfqdn("8.8.8.8") Returns the hostname of the machine.. socket.gethostname() Exception handling socket.error
Making a program using Python Sockets
How to make a simple port scanner program in Python.
This small port scanner program will try to connect on every port you define for a particular host. The first thing we must do is import the socket library and other libraries that we need.
Open up an text editor, copy & paste the code below.
Save the file as: “portscanner.py” and exit the editor
#!/usr/bin/env python import socket import subprocess import sys from datetime import datetime # Clear the screen subprocess.call('clear', shell=True) # Ask for input remoteServer = raw_input("Enter a remote host to scan: ") remoteServerIP = socket.gethostbyname(remoteServer) # Print a nice banner with information on which host we are about to scan print "-" * 60 print "Please wait, scanning remote host", remoteServerIP print "-" * 60 # Check what time the scan started t1 = datetime.now() # Using the range function to specify ports (here it will scans all ports between 1 and 1024) # We also put in some error handling for catching errors try: for port in range(1,1025): sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) result = sock.connect_ex((remoteServerIP, port)) if result == 0: print "Port {}: Open".format(port) sock.close() except KeyboardInterrupt: print "You pressed Ctrl+C" sys.exit() except socket.gaierror: print 'Hostname could not be resolved. Exiting' sys.exit() except socket.error: print "Couldn't connect to server" sys.exit() # Checking the time again t2 = datetime.now() # Calculates the difference of time, to see how long it took to run the script total = t2 - t1 # Printing the information to screen print 'Scanning Completed in: ', total
Sample output
Let’s run the program and see how an output can look like
$ python portscanner.py Enter a remote host to scan: www.your_host_example.com ------------------------------------------------------------ Please wait, scanning remote host xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx ------------------------------------------------------------ Port 21: Open Port 22: Open Port 23: Open Port 80: Open Port 110: Open Port 111: Open Port 143: Open Port 443: Open Port 465: Open Port 587: Open Port 993: Open Port 995: Open Scanning Completed in: 0:06:34.705170
Disclaimer
This program is intended for individuals to test their own equipment for weak security, and the author will take no responsibility if it is put to any other use