[SECURITY-L] Nessus 2.0 is out

[Silvana Mieko Misuta]

Subject: Nessus 2.0 is out
   Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 20:45:46 +0100
   From: Renaud Deraison <renaud em tenablesecurity.com>
       To: bugtraq em securityfocus.com


I'm pleased to announce the availability of Nessus 2.0.

What is Nessus
--------------

Nessus is a vulnerability assessment tool available under the GNU
General
Public Licence (GPL). It runs on many Unix-like systems
(Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/
Solaris/IRIX/MacOSX and probably others) but can audit a wide range of
hosts,
ranging from HP printers to Windows XP.

Its complete list of features is available at
http://www.nessus.org/features.html



What is new in Nessus 2.0
-------------------------

The focus of Nessus 2.0 was to clean up the code and greatly improve the

speed of nessusd. As a result, the major changes are :

- Brand new NASL interpretor, totally re-written from scratch

- Extended the NASL language to support new operators and functions

- Smarter plugin scheduling algorithms, for better parallelism

- New ways to perform service detection - each plugin which positively
  identifies a service registers it in the knowledge base. At the end
  of the scan, services which have not been recognized are flagged and
  appear in the report

- Greatly reduced memory usage

- Support for multiple CVE ids per plugin

- Support for Bugtraq IDs in the plugins

- New port scanner (synscan.nes) which computes the round trip time to
  the remote host. As a result, scanning firewalled hosts is faster

- Slightly improved the HTML reporting


What is *not* new in Nessus 2.0
--------------------------------

We did not change the GUI, so if you expect shiny new buttons, they're
not
there. We prefered to focus on the engine for this release, the rest
will
follow during the 2.1.x developement cycle.


Availability
------------

Nessus 2.0 is available at http://www.nessus.org/download.html


Talk
----

I will briefly present the speed improvements of Nessus 2.0 during
the talk Ron Gula and I will do about distributed scanning and IDS
correlation at CanSecWest (www.cansecwest.com)


Release notes
------------

These are platform-specific release notes :

o Linux

  synscan.nes does not work against localhost, because of the way
  the libpcap-0.4.x performs packet capture on the loopback interface.

o FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD

  Be sure to create a lot of /dev/bpf on your system before installing
  Nessus. You may want to check
http://cvs.nessus.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/nessus-libraries/README.BPF

  before installing Nessus

o Mac OS X

  MacOS X is supported, provided you installed the developer tools,
Apple's X11
  server and optionally GTK. Because of the very limited number of BPFs,
you
  may want to disable the 'ping host' plugin and use the tcp connect()
port
  scanner, as there is no easy way to increase those. Nessus includes a
  workaround but we suggest you avoid using it at this time.

o Solaris

  Be sure to use Bison 1.75 and gnu M4 when compiling Nessus

o IRIX

  Packet capture does not work, so the 'ping host' plugin will always
  return every host as being dead. Disable it, and use the tcp connect()

  port scanner.


Thanks
------

I would like to thank everyone who took part to the developement process

of Nessus 2.0, and in particular :

        Michel Arboi (who did the NASL rewriting)
        Javier Fernandez-Sanguino
        Jay(@kinetic.org)
        Erik Anderson
        Michael Scheidell

and to everyone who reported bugs, made suggestions, and sent feedback
during the whole 1.3.x developement cycle.


--
Renaud Deraison
Director of Research
Tenable Network Security
http://www.tenablesecurity.com