Formatting the Script Output | Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine

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Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine

By : Paulino Calderon

5 (1)

Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine

5 (1)

By: Paulino Calderon

Overview of this book

If you want to learn to write your own scripts for the Nmap Scripting Engine, this is the book for you. It is perfect for network administrators, information security professionals, and even Internet enthusiasts who are familiar with Nmap.

Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine

Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine

Credits

Credits

About the Author

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

About the Reviewers

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Preface

Free Chapter

Introduction to the Nmap Scripting Engine

Introduction to the Nmap Scripting Engine

Installing Nmap

Running NSE scripts

Script categories

Scan phases and NSE

Applications of NSE scripts

Setting up a development environment

Adding new scripts

Summary

Lua Fundamentals

Lua Fundamentals

Quick notes about Lua

Flow control structures

Data types

String handling

Common data structures

I/O operations

Coroutines

Metatables and metamethods

Summary

NSE Data Files

NSE Data Files

Locating your data directory

Data directory search order

Username and password lists used in brute-force attacks

Web application auditing data files

DBMS-auditing data files

Java Debug Wire Protocol data files

Other NSE data files

Other Nmap data files

Summary

Exploring the Nmap Scripting Engine API and Libraries

Exploring the Nmap Scripting Engine API and Libraries

Understanding the structure of an NSE script

Exploring environment variables

Accessing the Nmap API

The NSE registry

Writing NSE libraries

Exploring other popular NSE libraries

Summary

Enhancing Version Detection

Enhancing Version Detection

Understanding version detection mode in NSE

Writing your own version detection scripts

Examples of version detection scripts

Summary

Developing Brute-force Password-auditing Scripts

Developing Brute-force Password-auditing Scripts

Working with the brute NSE library

Reading usernames and password lists with the unpwdb NSE library

Managing user credentials found during scans

Writing an NSE script to launch password-auditing attacks against the MikroTik RouterOS API

Summary

Formatting the Script Output

Formatting the Script Output

Output formats and Nmap Scripting Engine

XML structured output

Printing verbosity messages

Including debugging information

The weakness of the grepable format

NSE script output in the HTML report

Summary

Working with Network Sockets and Binary Data

Working with Network Sockets and Binary Data

Working with NSE sockets

Understanding advanced network I/O

Manipulating raw packets

Raw packet handling and NSE sockets

Summary

Parallelism

Parallelism

Parallelism options in Nmap

Parallelism mechanisms in Lua

Parallelism mechanisms in NSE

Consuming TCP connections with NSE

Summary

Vulnerability Detection and Exploitation

Vulnerability Detection and Exploitation

Vulnerability scanning

Reporting vulnerabilities

Summary

Scan Phases

Scan Phases

NSE Script Template

NSE Script Template

Other templates online

Script Categories

Script Categories

Nmap Options Mind Map

Nmap Options Mind Map

References

References

Index

Index

XML structured output

The objective of the XML structured output is to return data to users in structures that are easier to parse than the blob of text returned by the older scripts. The best part is that we can take advantage of this feature transparently in our scripts using the standard functions provided by the Nmap API and the stdnse library. If you are considering sending your NSE script to get it included with official Nmap releases, I highly recommend making your scripts support the structured output.

Note

The official documentation of the stdnse and nmap libraries can be found here:

Implementing structured output in your scripts

Lua tables are perfect data structures to represent output, so they were the obvious choice to be used as return values by NSE. NSE scripts can implement structured output by returning one of the following values:

A Lua table
A Lua table and a string
A Lua table with a __tostring() metamethod...

Visually different images

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83

Tech Concepts

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Programming languages

73

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