Mock it locally, exploit it globally. One more reminder why it's useful to turn off your server signatures, especially if they spew out version information.
Oh ho ho no you don't. That's security through obscurity, and that's never ever OK for anybody.
I never understood this attitude. It has always been my experience that obscurity is in fact an important part of security. It's a weakness when mistaken for security, not when understood as part of it.
Sadly, I do actually have signatures (with version information) to mute.
People knee-jerk say that because they assume it's the only thing being done to secure an asset, when obviously it's a valid defense in depth measure, one with very low marginal cost (setting a few variables in conf files).
This really depends. The marginal cost of "what version is this box running, why doesn't this work, oh we don't have that tool?" could be very high on something like that.
I mean remembering, that the net is full of slow brute-forcers and the like. Just because it takes a few days to run through all the exploits doesn't mean that someone won't do it - that's thinking of security in human, individual terms, as though the threat is targeted rather then general.
But here is where it comes in handy: If you have your version numbers out there in some database and a 0 day for that particular version hits then you're hacked. If not then you might be able to patch your system before a breach happens. It's no guarantee but since it costs very little and gives you possibly a bit more time when you need it badly it does not hurt. Obviously you need to cross all your other t's and dot the i's too.
And if you need your headers to tell you what versions are running and what tools are installed you are doing something else very wrong.
I don't really understand your comment, it reads as if you're setting up a strange counterargument (one I very much disagree with) and then you agree with the original comment right after that.
Conceptually the output generation and the trace collection aren't coupled. As long as you can (a) instrument the target to collect traces and (b) programmatically feed it variant inputs, the same technique will work.
(This isn't a new concept, although afl is a particularly tight implementation of it; you can look up the paper for "autodafe" for a (much) earlier version).
This is a no-fun zone :) I thought the comment author meant to release (the kraken) out in the open - to test publicly (or at least on LAN) available services. Or am I missing something?
> it triggers a slightly different internal code path in the tested app
This would be impossible on the network.