An integrated passive reconnaissance and OSINT correlation framework for unified cyber intelligence gathering

Abstract

Passive reconnaissance has become increasingly significant in helping analysts obtain intelligence about target systems without directly interacting with them. Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) provides valuable information that can support security assessment, cyber investigation, and forensic analysis. However, information obtained from multiple sources is often redundant, fragmented, and represented in different formats. In this research, an Integrated Passive Reconnaissance and OSINT Correlation Framework is proposed to integrate information gathered from multiple passive intelligence sources, including WHOIS, DNS enumeration, search engine footprinting, and network path analysis. The framework performs information collection, normalization, entity correlation, and consolidation to generate a unified intelligence profile. Through entity correlation across different intelligence sources, the proposed framework reduces redundant information and improves the completeness and consistency of the gathered intelligence. To evaluate the framework, experiments were conducted using publicly available domain-related data. The collected information was processed to assess the framework’s capability to gather, normalize, correlate, and organize intelligence obtained from different OSINT sources. The evaluation used a dataset comprising 1,781 instances and 12 intelligence attributes extracted from multiple reconnaissance sources. The results achieved an attribute availability rate of 90.11% and demonstrated the generation of unified intelligence profiles from the collected reconnaissance information. The findings indicate that integrating heterogeneous passive reconnaissance sources can provide a more complete and structured representation of target intelligence, thereby reducing the manual effort required to consolidate information from multiple sources. The proposed framework provides a foundation for more efficient cyber intelligence gathering and can be extended in future work by incorporating additional OSINT sources and advanced correlation techniques.