Attack Surface Analyzer

Attack Surface Analyzer is a Microsoft developed open source security tool that analyzes the attack
surface of a target system and reports on potential security vulnerabilities introduced during
the installation of software or system misconfiguration.

Latest Version

Development for Attack Surface Analyzer is focused on the release/v2.3 branch.

Getting Attack Surface Analyzer

If you have the .NET SDK installed you can install Attack Surface Analyzer with
dotnet tool install -g Microsoft.CST.AttackSurfaceAnalyzer.CLI.

Platform specific binaries for Attack Surface Analyzer are distributed via our GitHub releases page.

Dependencies on Linux/Docker

Attack Surface Analyzer is built on .NET so .NET's linux dependencies must be installed to run ASA. Some linux distributions may not contain these packages by default.

For running Attack Surface Analyzer in Docker you should use the .NET Docker Image Base or another image that has the .NET SDK installed, and then install the ASA tool from Nuget in your Dockerfile like RUN dotnet tool install -g Microsoft.CST.AttackSurfaceAnalyzer.CLI

Documentation

Documentation is available on the Wiki.

Documentation for the API is available on GitHub Pages.

New Features in 2.3

New Blazor GUI with Rule Authoring and Testing Sandbox
New Collectors
Improved collection and analysis performance.
Support for C# 10/.NET 6

Overview

Attack Surface Analyzer 2 replaces the original Attack Surface Analyzer tool, released publicly in 2012.

Potential users of Attack Surface Analyzer include:

DevOps Engineers - View changes to the system attack surface introduced when your software is installed.
IT Security Auditors - Evaluate risk presented by when third-party software is installed.

Core Features

The core feature of Attack Surface Analyzer is the ability to "diff" an operating system's security configuration, before and after a software component is installed and to run arbitrary complex rules on the results to surface interesting findings. This is important because most installation processes require elevated privileges, and once granted, can lead to unintended system configuration changes.

Attack Surface Analyzer currently reports on changes to the following operating system components:

File system (static snapshot and live monitoring available)
User accounts
Services
Network Ports
Certificates
Registry
COM Objects
Event Logs
Firewall Settings
Wifi Networks
Cryptographic Keys
Processes
TPM Information

All data collected is stored in a set of local SQLite databases.

How to Use Attack Surface Analyzer

Run the following commands in an Administrator Shell (or as root). Replace asa with asa.exe as appropriate for your platform.

CLI Mode

To start a default all collectors run: asa collect -a

To compare the last two collection runs: asa export-collect

For other commands run: asa --help

GUI Mode

For the GUI interface run: asa gui and a browser window should open directed at http://localhost:5000 with the web based interface.

Detailed information on how to use Attack Surface Analyzer can be found on our
wiki.

Building

To build Attack Surface Analyzer, see BUILD.

Versions

The latest public version of Attack Surface Analyzer with public builds is 2.3 (see Release\v2.3).

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to
agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to,
and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit
https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you
need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply
follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all
repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the
Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct.

For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or
contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Reporting Security Issues

Security issues and bugs should be reported privately, via email, to the Microsoft Security
Response Center (MSRC) at secure@microsoft.com. You should
receive a response within 24 hours. If for some reason you do not, please follow up via
email to ensure we received your original message. Further information, including the
MSRC PGP key, can be found in
the Security TechCenter.