Some Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) scripts require databases to store lists of details such as usernames, passwords, miscellaneous strings, and Lua tables containing functions used as fingerprints. NSE stores these databases in a folder defined during installation. The entries selected for each database attempt to work as best as possible in the most common scenarios but avoid including large files in order to prevent bloating official releases.

Advanced users quickly understand that it is essential to update some of these databases for their daily tasks. The effectiveness of some NSE scripts is severely affected by how well we select databases used during our Nmap scans.

This chapter describes the most important data files in NSE so that you can decide when using the default database is enough and when you need to use a different one.

In this chapter, we will review the following files distributed with Nmap: