TCP Port Scanner Example using Spring Shell

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This post is about using Spring Shell to make a simple application for scanning open TCP ports.

Technologies used:

  1. Spring Boot 2.0.5.RELEASE
  2. Spring Shell 2.0.1.RELEASE

Quick Overview:

  1. Final Project Structure
  2. Creating a new base Spring Boot project
  3. Needs for parallelism
  4. How check whether a port is open?
  5. Integrating with Spring Shell
  6. How it works

1. Final Project Structure

2. Creating a new base Spring Boot project

We will start with a new project generated by Spring Initializr. We need just only one Spring dependency, i.e. Spring Shell.

All required dependencies are shown here:

<dependencies>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.shell</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-shell-starter</artifactId>
			<version>2.0.1.RELEASE</version>
		</dependency>
</dependencies>

Needs for parallelism

Scanning open ports can take a lot of time, especially when you are scanning thousands of ports. It is clear we need to parallel this task. The level of the parallelism can be defined with a number of possible threads inside our thread pool (just to be sure, we will use async support from Spring):

@Configuration
@EnableAsync
public class AsyncConfig implements AsyncConfigurer {

    @Value("${threads.count:20}")
    private int threadsCount;

    @Override
    public Executor getAsyncExecutor() {
        return Executors.newFixedThreadPool(threadsCount);
    }
}

How check whether a port is open?

Each of tries to check whether a port is open will contain the same step, i.e. a connect using java.net.Socket to a specific IP address and a specific port. When a connection timeout occurs a port is not open. Take notice that our method is annotated with @Async and return type is Future.

It means that everyone who calls this method will not be blocked until the end of a scanning process. In other words, this method starts running in another thread than the caller’s thread.

@Async
public Future<ScanResult> checkPort(String ip, int port) {
        try {
            Socket socket = new Socket();
            socket.connect(new InetSocketAddress(ip, port), timeout);
            socket.close();
            return new AsyncResult<>(new ScanResult(port, true));
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            return new AsyncResult<>(new ScanResult(port, false));
        }
}

Integrating with Spring Shell

Our goal is to create an application which will be able to scan open ports on a specific IP address. So it would be fine to create a command line application and Spring Shell will help us to do that.

At first, we need to create a new command so we will create a new class. Each of a method it will be a standalone command callable from a command line. The Spring Shell just only needs to know about this class and so-called method commands.

All of this can be configured using annotations: @ShellComponent on a class level and @ShellMethod on a method level. Command parameters are the same as method parameters with the possibility to customize it using @ShellOption.

Here is our implementation. First of all, we create a task for each of port to scan (calling method addToScan) and then we print a result to an output.

There is some magic to be able to scan either a single port or range of ports.

@ShellComponent
public class ScannerCommand {

    public static final String PORT_SEPARATOR = "-";
    private final ScannerService scannerService;

    @Autowired
    public ScannerCommand(ScannerService scannerService) {
        this.scannerService = scannerService;
    }

    @ShellMethod(value = "Scan open ports for a specific IP address")
    public String scan(
            @ShellOption(help = "IP address") String ip,
            @ShellOption(help = "Port or port range, e.g. 1-1024") String port,
            @ShellOption(help = "Weather only open ports should be displayed") boolean displayOnlyOpen
    ) throws ExecutionException, InterruptedException {
        //Add all required ports into port scanner
        List<Future<ScannerService.ScanResult>> futureList;
        if (port.contains(PORT_SEPARATOR)) {
            String[] rangeLimits = port.split(PORT_SEPARATOR);
            futureList = addToScan(ip, range(Integer.parseInt(rangeLimits[0]), Integer.parseInt(rangeLimits[1])));
        } else {
            futureList = addToScan(ip, Integer.parseInt(port));
        }

        //Read and write results
        for (final Future<ScannerService.ScanResult> scanResultFuture : futureList) {
            ScannerService.ScanResult scanResult = scanResultFuture.get();
            if (displayOnlyOpen) {
                if (scanResult.isOpen()) {
                    System.out.println(scanResult);
                }
            } else {
                System.out.println(scanResult);
            }
        }

        return "DONE";
    }

    private List<Future<ScannerService.ScanResult>> addToScan(String ip, int... ports) {
        List<Future<ScannerService.ScanResult>> result = new ArrayList<>();
        for (int port : ports) {
            result.add(scannerService.checkPort(ip, port));
        }
        return result;
    }
}

How it works

When you successfully run our application, you will see a command line prompt:

shell:>

You can use some predefined command such a help with our scan command:

shell:> help scan


NAME
	scan - Scan open ports for a specific IP address

SYNOPSYS
	scan [--ip] string  [--port] string  [--display-only-open]  

OPTIONS
	--ip  string
		IP address
		[Mandatory]

	--port  string
		Port or port range, e.g. 1-1024
		[Mandatory]

	--display-only-open	Weather only open ports should be displayed
		[Optional, default = false]

So let’s try our command with the option –display-only-open to display open ports only:

shell:>scan --ip 10.15.13.52 --port 1-1024 --display-only-open
port 22 - open
port 25 - open
DONE

You can find all source codes on my GitHub profile.

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