OS fingerprinting

What is OS fingerprinting?

OS fingerprinting can be defined as the process of pinging a device and detecting which OS it is running. This can be don't using various tools on various operating system.

Why you need to do this?

 By detecting the OS running on a system you can filter and use the exploits which have the higher probability to give you access of the system and maintain it with ease. It also helps you save time as you need to try the vulnerabilities which the system is patched.

How to?

•  For android:- The best tool which you can use for OS fingerprinting on an android device is Dsploit. The time required for OS detection is mostly dependent on device's RAM. To detect the OS first you need to select the device o which you what to do the OS detection. After that you need to select the inspector and then hit start. After a few minutes you will see the results.
  
• For Kali liunx:- Kali Linux has 2 tools to do this task:- 

Nmap is a port scanning tool which can be used for OS fingerprinting. There are various parameters which can be used to detect different details about the system. The one which we used was "nmap -sV -n -T4 -O -F --version-light 192.168.1.* "(without quotes). The * helps you to detect all the devices and  their OS on the network. You can experiment with different parameters for help you can type "nmap -h" (without quotes) for help or you can refer the official site. 

Armitage is an GUI tool which is mostly used for network exploitation. This tool comes with an host scan option which can help you to scan an detect the OS. There is an quick scan(OS detection) option under host scan which can be used for OS fingerprinting. And after the scan ends the result is displayed in and graphical format which can be changed as per your wish. You can observe that it runs the nmap command in the command line. The main advantage is that you need not to type the command and the graphical format is easy to understand.










Note:-
In our tests we found that this methods were unable to detect the phone's operating systems like android, Blackberry OS,etc.
If you are unable to detect the exact system then you can use the guess command in nmap to find out the probabilities of the system running different operating systems.