A Hybrid Approach to Operating System Discovery using Answer Set Programming

The goal of operating system (OS) discovery is to learn which OS is running on a distant computer. There are two main strategies for OS discovery: active and passive. Each of them has advantages as well as drawbacks. This paper discusses how answer set programming, a new logic programming paradigm, can be used to address, in a simple and elegant way, the problem of operating system discovery in computer networks by logically specifying the problem and providing solutions through automated reasoning. As a result of using such a knowledge representation framework, it is possible to unify the active and the passive methods to OS discovery in a single hybrid approach that has the advantages of both strategies while being much more versatile. Moreover, this paper presents a proof of concept prototype for hybrid operating system discovery.