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Research Access to Censys Data

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Censys started as a research project at the University of Michigan, and we continue to provide free Internet data to the research community. We provide verified researchers the same access to our data as our highest-tiered commercial customers.

Note
 You can try out a few searches right now for free at search.censys.io.

This article describes the data we provide and how to request access if you're a researcher.

Censys Datasets

There are three Censys datasets that we provide access to:

  1. Universal Internet Dataset (IPv4 + IPv6 Scanning): Censys continually scans the IPv4 address space and known IPv6 addresses on 3,500+ ports and 100 protocols in order to maintain a dataset that describes all publicly accessible hosts, including their services, software, and security risks. We publish an updated daily snapshot of the state of the public address space. We also store around 5 years of historical snapshots. 
  2. Certificates: We provide a dataset of all known unique X.509 certificates, which are downloaded from publicly known CT servers or found during Censys Internet scans. This dataset contains around 6 billion certificates.
  3. Deprecated IPv4 Scans: Before switching to a continuous scanning engine with automatic protocol detection, Censys performed regular ZMap scans of the IPv4 address space. While we no longer perform scheduled scans, we retain and can grant access to this historical data.

Qualifying for Research Access

We understand that not all researchers work at a university, have a formal title, or publish in academic venues. Many perform research in their free time, and we're more interested in knowing that you're performing research for the public good than in your job title.

There are two things we look for when granting research access:

  1. Impactful Research. We're most excited to provide data to researchers who want to improve real-world security for everyone. This might be measuring the impact of a vulnerability, helping track down C2 infrastructure, analyzing censorship in a region, or following up on abuse in the web PKI. Research is not trying to defend a single organization from attack, searching for phishing attempts against your company, or looking for problems to report for a bug bounty.
  2. Intent to Share (Publish). Research only benefits the community if results are shared with the world. For academics, this is typically in the form of a conference or journal publication, but can also be a blog post, talk at a conference like BSides or CCC, or an email to the mozilla.dev.security.policy mailing list. We expect anyone using our data to have a plan to share their results with the community. 

What if I perform research as part of my job?

If you're performing research as part of your job at a commercial organization, you are not eligible for a research account and will need to purchase commercial access. This also includes research that you might be performing on your own, but are presenting on behalf of your employer. Threat Intelligence Teams are rarely eligible for research access.

What if I'm looking for problems to submit to a bug bounty program?

We encourage you to use Censys to help notify companies about problems; however, we consider this commercial use, not research and do not provide free data access for this purpose.

Types of Research Access

We provide three types of elevated access to Censys data:

  1. Access to datasets in Google BigQuery. This allows running SQL against our datasets as well as starting Spark and Hadoop jobs against the data through Cloud dataproc. While we provide access to data, you will be responsible for computation costs on top of the data.
  2. Access to download raw datasets in Apache Avro format.
  3. Additional API tokens and increased API rate limit.

How to Request Research Access

Based on the information above, if you think that your projects qualifies for research access, please reach out to us at research@censys.io with the following information:

  1. Project description. What's the goal of your research project? Where are you planning on presenting the work? This doesn't need to be long but needs to describe a specific research question or research project. [3-4 sentences]
  2. A bit about yourself. Are you an independent researcher or a Ph.D. student? If you're a student, who is your advisor? Have you presented your research at conferences in the past or written up a blog post about your work? If you're an academic, a Google Scholar link is also fine! [2-3 sentences]
  3. How can Censys help? Please try our free access and see if it meets your needs before requesting additional access. Help us understand the limitations you're running into. What kind of access are you looking for (Google BigQuery, Raw Downloads, or Increased API limits)? If you are looking for BigQuery access, please include a Google account that we can grant access to. 
  4. How recent of data do you need? By default, we provide slightly delayed access to data (e.g., 1 week or 1 month delay). If you need data more quickly, please explain why. [1-2 sentences]
  5. Confirm Non-Commercial Use. Please confirm that you understand that the data you collect through your research account cannot be used for any commercial purpose and that any results you publish need to cite Censys.
  6. Agree to Terms of Service. Please confirm that you understand and agree to the Censys Terms of Service as a Censys Researcher Customer. https://censys.io/tos
  7. Censys Account. All approved researchers must have an existing Censys account. Please provide your Censys username. If you do not have an account, please register here.

Your message doesn't need to be long! We want a little bit of information about who you are and the goal of your project and how Censys can help out so that we can confirm you will be using the data non-commercially and non-maliciously.

Once we receive and review your request, our support team will get back to you in a few days. We may also check in with you down the road to see how things are going. 

Tip
 Creating a Censys account with your ".edu" email address will speed up the verification process.

How to Cite Censys

We ask that any publications that use data from Censys cite the service. If you're writing a blog post, feel free to just link to Censys. If you are writing an academic paper, please use the following BibTex:

@InProceedings{censys15,
    author = {Zakir Durumeric and David Adrian and Ariana Mirian 
              and Michael Bailey and J. Alex Halderman},
    title = {A Search Engine Backed by {I}nternet-Wide Scanning},
    booktitle = {22nd {ACM} Conference on Computer and 
                 Communications Security},
    month = oct,
    year = 2015
}

What if I'm not eligible?

If you're not eligible for free research access, please consider the following options:

  1. Commercial License. We offer commercial access to our datasets for Enterprise users.
  2. Free Tier for Community Members. We offer free access to the community. Create a free Censys account to perform a limited number of searches on our web UI at no charge every month.

Questions?

If you have any questions about research access, please reach out to us at research@censys.io.

 

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