Mobile Device Identification Using Nmap

Question

I am trying to identify a mobile device on a local network using Nmap, in particular an Android smartphone. Both my laptop and the target (Android smartphone) are connected to the same access point. I can ping a device, etc. When I run the standard Nmap scan on my smartphone, it says that all 1000 ports are closed, which is strange considering that I am browsing the website on the phone during the scan. With no open ports, device discovery is very difficult.

Does anyone know of an effective way to identify a smartphone on the network? Or can someone explain this behavior from a mobile device?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

nmap will only look for ports that are open and waiting for connections — ports on which services are running. You can use handset detection , but you need your device to visit a web page, since http headers are required to detect the device (disclaimer: my launch).

Amethon to do something like this (guessing from their commercial), perhaps by looking at the flow of traffic from the mirror port of the switch. Not sure what their product is worth, but they can help with questions or give you an approach.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

In my experience with nmap, I had to limit the speed of sending packets in order to detect some devices. You can do this with the option

- maximum speed: sending packets is not faster than per second

For instance:

nmap --max-rate 100 192.168.0.2 

Using this speed, nmap finds my smartphone, although its 1000 ports are closed. If I set it to 500 packets per second, it does not find it.

Answer 3

you can make a script where the arguments received are the current subnet you want to examine and the subnet mask ... just like nmap ... but ping the entire host on the current network instead of looking for open ports .. this will only tell you if the host is up ... but not if it's a smartphone ... maybe nessus can help you as it becomes more complete ...

Answer 4

You can use the following nmap -p1-65535 -O -p will indicate a scan of ports 1-65535 and -O will check the operation of the operating system on the device. Hope this helps!