naabu

A fast port scanner written in go with a focus on reliability and simplicity. Designed to be used in combination with other tools for attack surface discovery in bug bounties and pentests

RAW Doc

Naabu is a port scanning tool written in Go that allows you to enumerate valid ports for hosts in a fast and reliable manner. It is a really simple tool that does fast SYN/CONNECT/UDP scans on the host/list of hosts and lists
all ports that return a reply.

Features

  • Fast And Simple SYN/CONNECT/UDP probe based scanning
  • Optimized for ease of use and lightweight on resources
  • DNS Port scan
  • Automatic IP Deduplication for DNS port scan
  • IPv4/IPv6 Port scan (experimental)
  • Passive Port enumeration using Shodan Internetdb
  • Host Discovery scan (experimental)
  • NMAP integration for service discovery
  • Custom UDP payloads for CONNECT scans
  • Native UDP service probes powered by nmap-service-probes
  • Multiple input support - STDIN/HOST/IP/CIDR/ASN
  • Multiple output format support - JSON/TXT/STDOUT

Usage

sh
naabu -h

This will display help for the tool. Here are all the switches it supports.

text
/* Detailed source-code truncated for AI context efficiency. */

Installation Instructions

Download the ready to run binary / docker or install with GO

Prerequisite

Note: before installing naabu, make sure to install libpcap library for packet capturing.

To install libpcap on Linux: sudo apt install -y libpcap-dev, on Mac: brew install libpcap, on Windows: install Npcap

Installing Naabu

sh
go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/naabu/v2/cmd/naabu@latest

Running Naabu

To run the tool on a target, just use the following command.

sh
naabu -host hackerone.com

This will run the tool against hackerone.com. There are a number of configuration options that you can pass along with this command. The verbose switch -v can be used to display verbose information.

console
naabu -host hackerone.com

                  __
  ___  ___  ___ _/ /  __ __
 / _ \/ _ \/ _ \/ _ \/ // /
/_//_/\_,_/\_,_/_.__/\_,_/ v2.0.3

    projectdiscovery.io

[WRN] Use with caution. You are responsible for your actions
[WRN] Developers assume no liability and are not responsible for any misuse or damage.
[INF] Running SYN scan with root privileges
[INF] Found 4 ports on host hackerone.com (104.16.100.52)

hackerone.com:80
hackerone.com:443
hackerone.com:8443
hackerone.com:8080

The ports to scan for on the host can be specified via -p parameter (udp ports must be expressed as u:port). It takes nmap format ports and runs enumeration on them.

sh
naabu -p 80,443,21-23,u:53 -host hackerone.com

For UDP scans, you can specify a custom payload to send using the -cp or --connect-payload flag. This is particularly useful for UDP services that require specific data to respond:

sh
naabu -p u:53 -host example.com -cp "DNS query payload"

By default, the Naabu checks for nmap's Top 100 ports. It supports the following in-built port lists -

Flag Description
-top-ports 100 Scan for nmap top 100 port
-top-ports 1000 Scan for nmap top 1000 port
-p - Scan for full ports from 1-65535

You can also specify specific ports which you would like to exclude from the scan.

sh
naabu -p - -exclude-ports 80,443

To run the naabu on a list of hosts, -list option can be used.

sh
naabu -list hosts.txt

To run the naabu on a ASN, AS input can be used. It takes the IP address available for given ASN and runs the enumeration on them.

console
echo AS14421 | naabu -p 80,443

216.101.17.249:80
216.101.17.249:443
216.101.17.248:443
216.101.17.252:443
216.101.17.251:80
216.101.17.251:443
216.101.17.250:443
216.101.17.250:80

You can also get output in json format using -json switch. This switch saves the output in the JSON lines format.

console
naabu -host 104.16.99.52 -json

{"ip":"104.16.99.52","port":443}
{"ip":"104.16.99.52","port":80}

The ports discovered can be piped to other tools too. For example, you can pipe the ports discovered by naabu to httpx which will then find running http servers on the host.

console
echo hackerone.com | naabu -silent | httpx -silent

http://hackerone.com:8443
http://hackerone.com:443
http://hackerone.com:8080
http://hackerone.com:80

The speed can be controlled by changing the value of rate flag that represent the number of packets per second. Increasing it while processing hosts may lead to increased false-positive rates. So it is recommended to keep it to a reasonable amount.

IPv4 and IPv6

Naabu supports both IPv4 and IPv6, and both are enabled by default. If IPv6 is used, connectivity must be correctly configured, and the network interface must have an IPv6 address assigned (inet6) and a default gateway.

console
echo hackerone.com | naabu -p 80 -silent

104.16.99.52:80
104.16.100.52:80
2606:4700::6810:6434:80
2606:4700::6810:6334:80

The option -ip-version 6 makes the tool use only IPv6 addresses while resolving domain names.

console
echo hackerone.com | ./naabu -p 80 -ip-version 6

                  __
  ___  ___  ___ _/ /  __ __
 / _ \/ _ \/ _ \/ _ \/ // /
/_//_/\_,_/\_,_/_.__/\_,_/ v2.0.8

      projectdiscovery.io

Use with caution. You are responsible for your actions
Developers assume no liability and are not responsible for any misuse or damage.
[INF] Running CONNECT scan with non root privileges
[INF] Found 1 ports on host hackerone.com (2606:4700::6810:6334)
hackerone.com:80

To scan all the IPs of both versions, -scan-all-ips flag can be used.

console
echo hackerone.com | ./naabu -sa -p 80 -silent

[INF] Found 1 ports on host hackerone.com (104.16.100.52)
hackerone.com:80
[INF] Found 1 ports on host hackerone.com (104.16.99.52)
hackerone.com:80
[INF] Found 1 ports on host hackerone.com (2606:4700::6810:6334)
hackerone.com:80
[INF] Found 1 ports on host hackerone.com (2606:4700::6810:6434)
hackerone.com:80

Host Discovery

Naabu optionally supports multiple options to perform host discovery. Host discovery is optional and can be enabled with the -wn flag. -sn flag instructs the tool to perform host discovery only.

Available options to perform host discovery:

  • ARP ping (-arp)
  • TCP SYN ping (-ps 80)
  • TCP ACK ping (-pa 443)
  • ICMP echo ping (-pe)
  • ICMP timestamp ping (-pp)
  • ICMP address mask ping (-pm)
  • IPv6 neighbor discovery (-nd)

Configuration file

Naabu supports config file as default located at $HOME/.config/naabu/config.yaml, It allows you to define any flag in the config file and set default values to include for all scans.

Nmap integration

We have integrated nmap support for service discovery or any additional scans supported by nmap on the found results by Naabu, make sure you have nmap installed to use this feature.

To use,nmap-cli flag can be used followed by nmap command, for example:-

console
echo hackerone.com | naabu -nmap-cli 'nmap -sV -oX nmap-output'
                  __       
  ___  ___  ___ _/ /  __ __
 / _ \/ _ \/ _ \/ _ \/ // /
/_//_/\_,_/\_,_/_.__/\_,_/ v2.0.0        

    projectdiscovery.io

[WRN] Use with caution. You are responsible for your actions
[WRN] Developers assume no liability and are not responsible for any misuse or damage.
[INF] Running TCP/ICMP/SYN scan with root privileges
[INF] Found 4 ports on host hackerone.com (104.16.99.52)

hackerone.com:443
hackerone.com:80
hackerone.com:8443
hackerone.com:8080

[INF] Running nmap command: nmap -sV -p 80,8443,8080,443 104.16.99.52

Starting Nmap 7.01 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2020-09-23 05:02 UTC
Nmap scan report for 104.16.99.52
Host is up (0.0021s latency).
PORT     STATE SERVICE       VERSION
80/tcp   open  http          cloudflare
443/tcp  open  ssl/https     cloudflare
8080/tcp open  http-proxy    cloudflare
8443/tcp open  ssl/https-alt cloudflare

Service Version Detection

Naabu has built-in service version detection using nmap's service probes database. This runs in parallel with port scanning for maximum performance.

sh
naabu -host scanme.sh -sV
console
scanme.sh:22 [ssh OpenSSH/6.6.1p1]
scanme.sh:80 [http Apache httpd/2.4.7]
scanme.sh:9929 [nping-echo Nping echo]

[INF] Found 3 ports on host scanme.sh (45.33.32.156) with 3 services identified

Available flags:

Flag Description
-sV Enable service version detection
-sV-fast Only probe port-hinted services (faster, skips fallback probes)
-sV-timeout duration Timeout for service version probes (default 5s)
-sV-workers int Number of concurrent service version workers (default 25)
-sV-probes string Custom nmap-service-probes file path (auto-detected from local nmap install if empty)
-sD Service discovery (match port number to service name, no active probing)

The -sV flag requires the nmap-service-probes database file. naabu does not ship this database itself (it is licensed under the copyleft Nmap Public Source License, which is incompatible with naabu's MIT license), so it reads the file from a local nmap installation, automatically looking in standard nmap installation paths. To use a custom file, specify the path with -sV-probes.

UDP Service Probes

UDP services typically stay silent when they receive an empty datagram, so a blind UDP port scan misses most of them. With -uP (-udp-probes) naabu picks a protocol-specific payload from the nmap-service-probes database for each UDP port being scanned (DNS query for 53, NTP request for 123, SNMPv1 GetRequest for 161, and so on), so real services have something to reply to and naabu can report them as open.

sh
naabu -host scanme.sh -p u:53,u:123,u:161 -uP

Notes:

  • -uP is opt-in and additive. When disabled (the default) UDP scans keep their historical zero-length-datagram behavior.
  • The selected probe is the highest-priority (lowest-rarity) match for the destination port; if no probe is registered for a port the scan falls back to the empty datagram.
  • A user-supplied payload via -cp always wins over the automatic probe for that port.
  • -uP reuses the same probe database as -sV, so you can combine the two without paying the parse cost twice. The probe file is auto-located from a local nmap install; use -sV-probes to point at a custom file. If no database can be found -uP logs a warning and is silently disabled.

CDN/WAF Exclusion

Naabu also supports excluding CDN/WAF IPs being port scanned. If used, only 80 and 443 ports get scanned for those IPs. This feature can be enabled by using exclude-cdn flag.

Currently cloudflare, akamai, incapsula and sucuri IPs are supported for exclusions.

Scan Status

Naabu exposes json scan info on a local port bound to localhost at http://localhost:63636/metrics (the port can be changed via the -metrics-port flag)

Using naabu as library

The following sample program scan the port 80 of scanme.sh. The results are returned via the OnResult callback:

go
package main

import (
	"log"

	"context"
	"github.com/projectdiscovery/goflags"
	"github.com/projectdiscovery/naabu/v2/pkg/result"
	"github.com/projectdiscovery/naabu/v2/pkg/runner"
)

func main() {
	options := runner.Options{
		Host:      goflags.StringSlice{"scanme.sh"},
		ScanType: "s",
		OnResult: func(hr *result.HostResult) {
			log.Println(hr.Host, hr.Ports)
		},
		Ports: "80",
	}

	naabuRunner, err := runner.NewRunner(&options)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer naabuRunner.Close()

	naabuRunner.RunEnumeration(context.Background())
}

OnResult is called once after the scan completes with aggregated results. To process results in real-time as ports are discovered, use OnReceive instead. The Stream option only controls async target loading — it does not affect when callbacks fire.

Notes

  • Naabu allows arbitrary binary execution as a feature to support nmap integration.
  • Naabu is designed to scan ports on multiple hosts / mass port scanning.
  • As default naabu is configured with a assumption that you are running it from VPS.
  • We suggest tuning the flags / rate if running naabu from local system.
  • For best results, run naabu as root user.

Naabu is made with 🖤 by the projectdiscovery team. Community contributions have made the project what it is.

See the Thanks.md file for more details.