I recently performed a security scan in my environment and I noticed a that on one application in particular( name withheld to protect the vendor) an error message was generated when I scanned a particular, listening port. I wanted to investigate this further so I put together a quick perl script to connect to the suspect port repeatedly. 

#!d:/perl/bin/perl  -w
use strict;
use Socket;

my $line = "A" x 1000;

my ($iaddr, $sin, $proto);
my $max = 2000;
my $port = <suspect port here>;
while (1)  {
$proto   = getprotobyname('tcp');
socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto);
$iaddr = gethostbyname('IP address of device');
$sin = sockaddr_in($port, $iaddr);
connect(SOCK, $sin);
send(SOCK,$line,0,$iaddr);
}

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This resulted in killing the application listening to this port and the processor utilization shot to 100%. I'm interested in knowing if there is a better way to stress test network applications with Perl and, in particular, the experiences of other monks when working on a problem such as this. I will also be notifying the vendor but I want to spend a few more days looking at this.
cheers, -semio

In reply to application stress testing with Perl by semio

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