Re: optimizing scan by OS

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 11:05:58AM -0700, Stuart Kendrick wrote:
> is there a way to instruct Nessus to rely on nmap's OS guess and to not 
> bother with the attacks which are unlikely to be relevant?

This has been discussed in the past. The bottom line is that the OS is -
most of the time - irrelevant. Services are cross-platforms, and so are
their security bugs. Think about something like Apache, which runs both
on Windows and Linux (and MacOSX and SCO and a bunch of other
platforms). Think about embedded devices which run a highly modified
version of the Linux kernel. Think about a Linux host which NATs a
service on port 8080 to a Windows box. And so on...

That is not to say that nothing can be done - we can better classify the
services, and in some cases (like the macos_x_directory_svc_dos.nasl
plugin you mention) we could become much more dependant on the OS.


That being said, you're also complaining about an AC_DENIAL plugins.
Such plugins are slow by their very nature, and their whole point is to
stress your network services to see if any of them crashes. Most of the
time, you do not (or should not) want to see any kind of optimization
for these plugins, because they are written in a such a generic way that
they could probably crash other services as well.

If you want a fast audit, you should enable safe checks and the
optimizations.

                                -- Renaud
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