HowTo Perform A Security Audit With hping3 (DoS)

Overview

This page discusses the use of hping3 to perform a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack as part of a security audit. Information on this page was derived from the blackMORE Ops article: "Denial-of-service Attack – DoS using hping3 with spoofed IP in Kali Linux". hping3 is install on Network Security Toolkit (NST) like many other security auditing and penetration tools.

hping3 Explained

hping3 is a free packet generator and analyzer for the TCP/IP protocol. Hping is one of the de-facto tools for security auditing and testing of firewalls and networks, and was used to exploit the Idle Scan scanning technique now implemented in the Nmap port scanner. hping3, is scriptable using the Tcl language and implements an engine for string based, human readable description of TCP/IP packets, so that the programmer can write scripts related to low level TCP/IP packet manipulation and analysis in a very short time.

Like most tools used in computer security, hping3 is useful to security experts, but there are a lot of applications related to network testing and system administration.

hping3 Intended Use Cases

• Traceroute / ping / probe hosts behind a firewall that blocks attempts using the standard utilities.
• Perform the idle scan (now implemented in nmap with an easy user interface).
• Test firewall rule sets.
• Test IDS systems.
• Exploit known vulnerabilities of TCP/IP stacks.
• Networking research.
• Learn and explore TCP/IP.
• Write real applications related to TCP/IP testing and security.
• Automated firewall tests.
• Proof of concept exploits.
• Networking and security research when there is the need to emulate complex TCP/IP behavior.
• Prototype IDS systems.
• Simple to use networking utilities with Tk interface.