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Genesis

One of the greatest challenges in defensive cybersecurity is the detection of vulnerabilities on exposed services. To achieve this, it is essential to determine the service version. Over time, and thanks to the best practices of system administrators, fewer and fewer versions are publicly accessible (whether via server response headers or status endpoints). Since our goal as white hats is to continue alerting infrastructures hosting vulnerable services, we need to detect versions in another way. Verdex was born.

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How it works

Verdex determines the features present on the target to efficiently deduce the likely versions. For example, if:
  • feature A was introduced with version 1
  • feature B was introduced with version 2
and after several checks, the target has feature A but not feature B, Verdex concludes that product is running version 1. To give a concrete example, Keycloak has introduced a new translation key bruteForceStrategy in version 26.0.4, which didn’t exist before. If this translation key is detected on a Keycloak service, Verdex concludes that it is running at least version 26.0.4. Verdex relies solely on non-aggressive methods, in particular by using mostly static assets (javascript, css and html files). Since this detection process is complex, feel free to contribute to Verdex to improve templates.