1. Censys
  2. Censys Attack Surface Management
  3. Foundations of ASM: Inventory Introduction

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Asset Inventory Exploration Page

  • Updated

What assets comprise the inventory?

An attack surface can be composed of hosts, web entities, certificates, domains, and storage buckets.

  • Hosts are computers, virtual machines or devices connected to the Internet with an IP address.

  • Web entities are named entities running on a specific port that provide services or content using the HTTP protocol.

  • Domains (following the eTLD+1 format) are names that represent DNS zones.

  • Certificates are documents used during TLS handshakes to validate identities.

  • Storage buckets are object storage solutions available from Cloud Service Providers.

How do I use the Inventory list page?

The Inventory list page displays all of your organization’s assets.

You can explore, browse, and investigate these assets with basic and advanced searching, clickable shortcuts, and aggregations.

Navigate to the page by opening the Inventory nav item and clicking the All Inventory option from the dropdown menu.

Inventory navigation menu
Figure 1. Inventory page shown in Inventory navigation menu

The default view of the table shows all asset types indexed by their ID, which is dependent on type.

Columns in the default view include:

  • Risks - A count of any risks detected on an asset by their severity.

  • Source - An enumeration indicating how an asset was added to your attack surface: as a seed, from a cloud connector, or via Censys discovery scans.

  • Tags - Any tags your team has applied to an asset.

  • Added - The date an asset was associated to your organization.

  • Cloud - The name of the hosting provider or the name of the cloud or data center in which the IP address is hosted.

  • Expiration Date - The date on which a certificate or domain expires/expired.

Column Selection

Additional columns are dependent on asset type and can be displayed in the table by clicking the plus (+) button at the far right of the header row.

Inventory table with column selection modal open
Figure 2. Column selection modal open

Select or deselect the columns to create your desired view. Additional column options include:

Certificates

  • Fingerprint - The identifier of the certificate: a SHA-256 digest of its contents.

  • Issuer - The certificate authority that issued the certificate.

  • Key Type - The encryption algorithm used to generate the certificate’s public key.

  • Pre-certificate - A boolean indicating whether the poison extension is marked critical, which makes the document an artifact of Certificate Transparency regulations and not able to be used.

  • Self-Signed - Whether or not the certificate is self-signed.

  • Subject Organization - The name of the organization to which the certificate was issued, if available.

  • Valid - A Censys indicator of trustworthiness, based on the certificate’s trust anchor status among root stores.

Domains

  • Cloud - The name of the Cloud Service Provider whose name servers are authoritative for this domain, if applicable.

  • Registrar - The registrar or reseller with which the domain name was registered.

  • Name Servers - The names of the servers responsible for answering DNS lookups, as obtained from the DNS record for the domain name. Usually there are two or more for redundancy.

  • Mail Servers - The names of any servers which receives mail for mailboxes in the domain, if applicable, as obtained from MX records for the domain name.

Hosts

  • ASN - The numerical identifier of the autonomous system that a host’s IP address is part of.

  • AS Name - The human readable name of the autonomous system that a host’s IP address is part of.

  • Continent - The continent where the IP address is located.

  • Country - The country where the IP address is located.

  • Host Labels - Censys-applied informational labels.

  • IP - One of two potential identifiers of a host: its IPv4 address.

  • Name - The identifier of the virtual host, if applicable. The name used in scan.

  • Names on Host - Names from the Domain Name System that resolve to the host.

    • Ports/Protocols - The numerical identifiers of the open ports on the host, annotated with the application-layer protocols that the host services are utilizing.

  • Software - The names of software packages detected on the host in scan.

  • Shared Host - Whether the host is used by a web hosting provider to serve a variety of websites.

Web Entities

  • HTML Title - The title(s) of any web page(s) returned by a web entity’s instances during a scan.

  • HTTP Status Code - The status code(s) returned by a web entity’s instances during a scan.

  • Instance Count - The total number of instances of the web entity observed during all Censys scans.

    Note
    		 Only the first 100 instances are searchable.

  • Software - The names of hardware, operating system or application software packages detected on a web entity’s instances in scan.

  • TLS Version Selected - The TLS version(s) selected by a web entity’s instances during a scan.

Storage Buckets

  • Account ID (AWS specific) - The AWS account associated with this bucket.

  • Cloud - The cloud storage provider hosting this bucket.

  • Access - The access configuration for this bucket. Access levels include Readable, Writeable, and Editable Settings.

Using the Search Bar

Provide search criteria using the Censys Search Language to search the fields listed in the ASM Asset schema docs.

Save Queries

Save queries by clicking the bookmark icon on the right side of the search bar and providing a name.

Inventory table with save query modal open

Run Saved Queries

Open the Saved Queries menu to access and manage your team’s saved queries.

Inventory table with save query modal open

From this menu, you can run searches, edit the name, copy a query, or remove it from the list.

Clickable Search Shortcuts

The left panel of the Inventory page displays the most common values of interesting fields for the assets in the inventory table with a count of assets.

Click a displayed value to run a query that returns the matching assets numbered.

search shortcuts simple click

Hover over a displayed value to reveal an include and exclude option.

search shortcuts hover

Clicking the exclude option (i.e., the minus sign) will populate the search bar with a query that will remove assets with that attribute from the results.

search shortcuts hover

View Aggregations

To view top values for less common fields than are shown in the Search Shortcuts panel, click the View Aggregations button.

Use the autocomplete functionality to select the field you wish to see top values for.

aggregations autocomplete

A term aggregation can be performed for any field in the schema, and will take place for any assets returned by the query in the search bar.

aggregation

If no query is present in the search bar when the View Aggregations button is selected, aggregations will take place for all applicable assets.

Export Data

Download an asset list as a comma separated value (CSV) sheet for use in other products and workflows.

Click the Actions button and select Download CSV from the dropdown menu.

Download asset list as a CSV
Figure 3. Download the asset list as a CSV

The default filename is {timestamp}_{customerName}_InventoryExport.csv, and the columns in the CSV file reflect the columns displayed in the table when exported.

Details Pages

Click on the linked asset in the table to see a detail page with additional information.

Click an asset in the table for more info
Figure 4. Click an asset in the table to see details

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