Extending Metaploit 3.0 to Vulnerability Scanning

[chuck.lists at gmail.com (Chuck)]

Hello all,

   As I'm sure most of you are aware, there is a fair amount of
discussion going on about Nessus going to a "Free Beer" license.  I
personally understand Tenable's reasoning, but I don't want to get
into a discussion about that here.  Some people have also called for a
fork of the GPL Nessus to continue development, but I am not convinced
such as effort succeed.

   What I have been thinking about, though, is the feasibility of
creating a new vulnerability scanner in Ruby that would be kind of an
extension of Metasploit 3.0 (it would use the same exploits, primarily
the check functions).  I think that using an established and modular
language makes a lot of sense for the "plugins" rather than Nessus'
custom language (NASL).

   I wouldn't worry about a GUI or anything, I am basically thinking
of a scanning engine that takes an XML config file.  Then, it could
use Ruby/DBI to connect to a database which could function similarly
to Nessus' knowledge base.  The modules would also store results in
that database and the results would get dumped to an XML file at the
end (which could then be transformed to HTML with an XSL for a pretty
report if desired).

   This system would probably never approach the number of checks that
Nessus has, but it could differentiate itself by at least having the
option to actually exploit systems to verify vulnerabilities and give
a few low false positive rate.

   My question for the list (primarily HD and the other developers
that are working on version 3.0) is basically, how hard it would be to
create such an animal?  It sounds relatively easy to me to build the
engine and then you need the modules.  The good thing is that I think
the community has already shown support by writing modules for
Metasploit (in part because they are "more fun" than simply
vulnerability checks).  Unfortunately, I probably will not have much
time to contribute to the project (long story), but I wanted to throw
the idea out there and see if was feasible and if anyone would pick up
the ball and run with it.

Chuck