CLI Usage

Before continuing please ensure you have successfully configured your credentials.

censys config

The configuration file by default is written to ~/.config/censys/censys.cfg, but you can change this by setting the CENSYS_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.

export CENSYS_CONFIG_PATH=/path/to/config/file

Optionally, you can enable tab completion for the CLI by adding this line to your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or equivalent.

eval "$(register-python-argcomplete censys)"

Note

Please note that autocomplete is supported for field names in the search command.

search

Below we show an example of searching hosts from the CLI.

censys search 'services.http.response.html_title: "Dashboard"'

By combining the search command with jq we can easily manipulate the output to get the desired fields.

censys search 'services.service_name: ELASTICSEARCH' | jq -c '.[] | {ip: .ip}'

By setting the --pages flag to -1 we can get all pages of results.

censys search 'ip: 8.8.8.0/16' --pages -1 | jq -c '[.[] | .ip]'

By settings the --index-type flag we can search other indexes such as certificates.

censys search 'parsed.subject_dn: "censys.io"' --index-type certificates

For the certificates index we can also add the --fields flag to specify which fields we want returned.

censys search 'parsed.subject.country: AU' --index-type certificates --fields parsed.issuer.organization

view

Below we show an example of viewing a host from the CLI.

censys view 8.8.8.8

Below we show an example of viewing a certificate from the CLI.

censys view 9b267decc8d23586dc4c56dd0789574cab0f28581ef354ff2fcec8ca6d992fc2 --index-type certificates

You can save results to a file using the -o argument.

censys view 8.8.8.8 -o google.json

We can then parse this json with something like jq.

cat google.json | jq '[.services[] | {port: .port, protocol: .service_name}]'

If you have access to historical hosts data you can view the data at a specific point in time using the --at-time argument.

censys view 1.1.1.1 --at-time 2023-01-01

Note

The --at-time argument is only available for the hosts index.

subdomains

Below we show an example of subdomain enumeration from the CLI.

censys subdomains censys.io

You can limit the number of results by setting the --max-records flag.

censys subdomains censys.io --max-records 10

We can then output the results in JSON format using the --json flag.

censys subdomains censys.io --json

account

Below we show an example of viewing your account information from the CLI.

censys account

You can also request the JSON version of your account information.

censys account --json

asm

add-seeds

Below we show an example of adding seeds from the CLI.

censys asm add-seeds -j '["1.1.1.1"]'

You can also add seeds from STDIN using the -i - argument. In the example below we are adding IPs from a Censys Search.

censys search 'services.tls.certificates.leaf_data.issuer.common_name: "Roomba CA"' | jq '[.[] | .ip]' | censys asm add-seeds -i -

You can also add seeds from a nmap XML file using the --nmap-xml argument. In the example below we are adding IPs from a nmap scan on censys.io.

nmap censys.io -oX censys.xml
censys asm add-seeds --nmap-xml censys.xml