The debut of open source vulnerability scanner has not been met with the fanfare Cloudflare would have liked
Cloudflare has open-sourced a network vulnerability scanner it’s calling ‘Flan Scan’, but the move hasn’t been met with approval from all information security quarters.
On Thursday, the web infrastructure and security firm said the tool was originally developed in response to internal security compliance challenges.
“We created Flan Scan after two unsuccessful attempts at using ‘industry standard’ scanners for our compliance scans,” Cloudflare said.
“A little over a year ago, we were paying a big vendor for their scanner until we realized it was one of our highest security costs and many of its features were not relevant to our setup.”
Cloudflare added that it was not getting its “money’s worth” from existing scanners and so switched to an open source option in order to meet tight compliance deadlines.
“We needed a scanner that could accurately detect the services on our network and then lookup those services in a database of CVEs to find vulnerabilities relevant to our services,” Cloudflare says.
“Additionally, unlike other scanners we had tried, our tool had to be easy to deploy across our entire network.”
Proof of the pudding
Flan Scan is not an original invention. Instead, the release is a wrapper around Nmap, a network scanner long popular with penetration testers.
Under the hood, Nmap is used together with the vulners script – code that provides additional information on vulnerabilities including relevant CVSS scores.
The script pings a third-party remote server – the vulners.com API – to check if the target software has been connected to known security issues, and its use can be restricted to CVSS scores ..
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