Towards Improving Productivity in NMapSecurity Audits
José Manuel Redondo, D. Cuesta, Computer Network Attack (CNA), S2Grupo, Valencia, Spain · Journal of Web Engineering · 2019
Maintaining an adequate security level in computer infrastructures requires periodic assessment of their vulnerabilities.This is specially critical in Internet-facing web servers.These audits require specialized security tools.nmap is arguably the most popular one, due to its versatility, powerful features, and low resource usage.However, this versatility turns using nmap difficult and error-prone.Finding its most convenient features can be difficult, and usage errors are reported at runtime.This commonly leads users with low experience to suboptimal results.This research aims to decrease this complexity by developing an advanced web GUI for nmap that solves the shortcomings of the official one, complemented with a statically typed DSL that early detects syntax, type and semantic usage errors.These products expand the usage possibilities of nmap, creating schedulable, distributable, and portable auditing tasks able to find anomalies analyzing their output.Our initial release shows that the web GUI has been well received by several security related media and professionals.The DSL can detect a wide range of potential errors, substantially increasing the robustness of the auditing tasks created with the web GUI or standalone.Therefore, using statically typed DSLs with early detection of type errors can be a suitable tool to lower the complexity of tools with a large number of possibilities such as nmap.