Re: Nessus scripts and Moore's Law

On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 06:06:29PM +0100, Michel Arboi wrote:

> I have come with several possibilities to reduce the overall scanning
> time:

What are people's feelings about combining related plugins, especially
those that rely on simple version strings? For example, I count 9
plugins named apache_2_0_*.nasl, most of which do nothing more than
check the banner.  It seems to me that they could be replaced by a
single plugin that checks the banner against the latest version and is
updated as new versions and vulnerabilities are announced.  [ Perhaps
nessus-update-plugins could be augmented to support removing plugins
(optionally??) to help with this. ]

This suggests, though, a greater degree of editorial control over
plugins development than what currently exists.  Are there resources for
that and is it still consistent with the open and distributed nature of
plugin development?

> 4. Make sure that all plugins do not perform redundant operations. 
> e.g. if a plugin need a banner, it should be grabbed from the KB, not
> read on the network.

This is a good idea, one that I've strived to implement with my plugins,
especially those involving web applications (which reduces the need to
scan a bunch of locations looking for the application itself). 

George
-- 
[email protected]

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