Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) was a free software vulnerability scanner for analyzing networked computers. SATAN captured the attention of a broad technical audience, appearing in ''

PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...

'' and drawing threats from the

United States Department of Justice The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United State ...

. It featured a web interface, complete with forms to enter targets, tables to display results, and context-sensitive tutorials that appeared when a vulnerability had been found.

Naming

For those offended by the name SATAN, the software contained a special command called ''repent'', which rearranged the letters in the program's acronym from "SATAN" to "SANTA".

Description

The tool was developed by

Dan Farmer Dan Farmer (born April 5, 1962) is an American computer security researcher and programmer who was a pioneer in the development of vulnerability scanners for Unix operating systems and computer networks. Life and career Farmer developed his ...

and

Wietse Venema Wietse Zweitze Venema (born 1951) is a Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix email system. He also wrote TCP Wrapper and collaborated with Dan Farmer to produce the computer security tools SATAN and The Coroner's To ...

Neil Gaiman Neil Richard MacKinnon GaimanBorn as Neil Richard Gaiman, with "MacKinnon" added on the occasion of his marriage to Amanda Palmer. ; ( Neil Richard Gaiman; born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, gr ...

drew th
artwork
for the SATAN documentation. SATAN was designed to help systems administrators automate the process of testing their systems for known vulnerabilities that can be exploited via the network. This was particularly useful for networked systems with multiple hosts. Like most security tools, it was useful for good or malicious purposes – it was also useful to would-be intruders looking for systems with security holes. SATAN was written mostly in

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

and utilized a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

such as Netscape, Mosaic or Lynx to provide the user interface. This easy to use interface drove the scanning process and presents the results in summary format. As well as reporting the presence of vulnerabilities, SATAN also gathered large amounts of general network information, such as which hosts are connected to subnets, what types of machines they are and which services they offered.

Status

SATAN has fallen from popularity after the height of its popularity in the 1990s. SATAN was released in 1995 and development has ceased. In 2006, SecTools.Org conducted a security popularity poll and developed a list of 100 network security analysis tools in order of popularity based on the responses of 3,243 people. Results suggest that SATAN has been replaced by

nmap Nmap (Network Mapper) is a network scanner created by Gordon Lyon (also known by his pseudonym ''Fyodor Vaskovich''). Nmap is used to discover hosts and services on a computer network by sending packets and analyzing the responses. Nmap provides ...

, Nessus and to a lesser degree SARA (Security Auditor's Research Assistant), and

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References

{{reflist

External links

Official home page

History of SATAN
Unix network-related software Network analyzers Internet Protocol based network software Computer security software Security technology Computer-related introductions in 1995