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How to Seed the Censys ASM Platform

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The Importance of Seeds

Seeding the Censys Attack Surface Management platform with known assets allows you to make the most of its powerful scanning and attributing capabilities.

With provided assets to start from, our platform can map the full extent of your digital footprint across the entire Internet and discern the perimeter of your network with accuracy.

Want to use Censys to find your seeds? Follow this guide.

Assets You Can Add as Seeds

The following assets make great seeds. Not all of the options listed below are necessary or even applicable to your organization, so they are listed from most to least common.

  • Domains - Domain names identify DNS administrative zones, are registered with a registrar, and often have name servers or mail servers associated with them.

    Example: censys.io

  • Other names - Other DNS names identify services (e.g., me.censys.io) and map to one or more IP addresses where the services are running. These can be added as a "Domain" type.

    Example: app.censys.io

  • IP addresses - IP addresses are a numerical label assigned to a device or service connected to the Internet in order to identify and reach it.

    Example: 8.8.8.8

  • CIDR Blocks - A CIDR is a range of sequential IP addresses (in CIDR notation) that has been assigned to an organization for their use.

    Example: 8.8.8.0/24

  • ASNs - An autonomous system number is a numerical identifier of a connected group of one or more blocks of IP addresses that have been assigned to an organization.

    Example: 123

Add a Seed in the App

On the Dashboard panel, click on your username icon in the top right corner and select Add Seeds from the dropdown menu.

Censys Add Seed Data Menu Item
Figure 1. Menu showing the Add Seed Data option

There are two steps to add seeds:

  1. Input data

  2. Verify and submit

Input Data

On the input step, enter your assets in the text box, or upload a CSV or text file.

After you’re done, click the *Input Data button.

Censys Input Seed Data
Figure 2. How to input seed data

Verify and Submit

On the verification step, resolve any issues and verify the correctness of all of your assets in each section. Then, click Submit Data.

Censys Resolve Seed Upload Errors
Figure 3. Seed error resolution page

After submission, you’ll see a confirmation page.

Censys Seed Confirmation
Figure 4. Seed data confirmation page

Add a Seed via API

You can also add seeds with our REST API by making the following call:

POST ++https://app.censys.io/api/v1/seeds

Example Request Body

{
  "seeds": [
    {
      "type": "ASN",
      "value": 0,
      "label": "emeahq"
    },
    {
      "type": "IP_ADDRESS",
      "value": "1.1.1.1",
      "label": "dns"
    },
    {
      "type": "DOMAIN_NAME",
      "value": "example.com",
      "label": "main"
    },
    {
      "type": "CIDR",
      "value": "127.0.0.0/16",
      "label": "internal"
    }
  ]
}

To see more seed management methods, visit to our API documentation.

View Seed Data

To view your organization’s seed data, click the Inventory item from the top navigation bar and select Seed Data from the dropdown menu.

Navigate to Seed List
Figure 5. Navigate to seed page

The page opens by default to seeds you’ve provided.

Censys Provided Seed List
Figure 6. Seed data list page

The two cards at the top of the page enumerate the total number of assets provided to the Censys platform via seeds, and the total number of assets discovered by the platform, with links to those lists.

The table on the bottom of the page lists all the seed data added to the platform, with information that includes the asset type, the value, the source (that is, the interface used to add the seed), and a label, if given by the user.

If you think you might be missing some seeds, you can use Censys to find them!

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