A Comparative Study of Credentialed Vulnerability Scanning and Non-credentialed Vulnerability Scanning
Anjie Chen, Zhibing Zhang · 2021
Vulnerability scanning is a common technique to detect security problems in computer systems. The scanning methods are divided into credentialed vulnerability scanning and non-credentialed vulnerability scanning. However, the relation and the difference between the results of two scanning types remain unclear in practice. In this paper, we use Nessus to scan 67 common hosts using the two methods, and perform a comparative analysis of the scan results. Our study shows that the results of the credentialed scans cover the results of the non-credentialed scans in most cases. Also, the difference between the scan results vary accordingly to the hosts’ security level, and the variation presents linearity in general.