Cloudflare releases modified open source version of Nmap scanner

Cloudflare has released its own vulnerability scanner. The Flan Scan is an open source Nmap scanner with a number of additional functionalities. The tool can be used to detect known vulnerabilities in software or servers.

The code of Cloudflares scanner is on GitHub. Cloudflare writes in a blog post that the company always paid a lot of money for a scanner to make its applications compliant, but that it barely used many of its expensive features. Such security scanners are used to scan applications on Cloudflare’s network for vulnerabilities, allowing the company to act more quickly against such vulnerabilities. In practice, it seems that the tool mainly compares vulnerabilities against a database with CVEs in it.

The Flan Scan is a fairly simple wrapper of the Nmap scanner. Cloudflare says Nmap was the best tool to build the scanner because Nmap is more accurate and finds more vulnerabilities. The company has also added the option to directly save the results to a Google Cloud or AWS S3 bucket. Flan Scan also runs in a Docker container. Another big difference with Nmap is that the scanner can write a result to LaTeX reports via Python. Users don’t seem very impressed for the time being: on Reddit users write that the tool mainly finds old results.