Port Authority (Donate)

Port Authority is a powerful tool designed for systems and security purposes. It is a fast port scanner that allows users to quickly discover hosts on their network and obtain useful network information about their device and other hosts. With its heavily threaded design, Port Authority is able to perform host discovery in less than 5 seconds and scan 1000 ports in just 10 seconds, even if the device being scanned drops or rejects packets.

Some of the key features of Port Authority include LAN host discovery, public IP discovery, MAC address vendor detection, LAN/WAN host TCP port scanning, custom port range scans, and the ability to open discovered HTTP(S) services in a browser. It also offers lightweight service fingerprinting for SSH/HTTP(S) server type and version, as well as DNS record lookups for almost every record type. Additionally, Port Authority has the capability to wake-on-LAN for LAN hosts.

The speed of Port Authority's scans is achieved through its use of threading. This allows for more threads to be used than the number of cores on a device, making it highly efficient for I/O bound operations. However, this can also cause crashes on lower end or older devices due to memory limitations. To address this, users can adjust the number of threads used for port scans in the settings.

Some users may encounter warnings about the application trying to send email. This is often caused by security software detecting outbound connections to port 25 (SMTP) and flagging it as a potential threat. However, Port Authority does not actually send any data to this port and the warning can be disregarded. The application is also 100% free and open source, with its code available on GitHub.

If users are not finding certain hosts or open ports, they can adjust the host scan timeout and connection timeout settings. However, this may result in longer scan times. It is also important to note that scanning over a WAN (such as a mobile network) may be affected by network quality and may require a higher timeout to tolerate latency spikes. Overall, Port Authority is a reliable and efficient tool for network discovery and security purposes.