RE: [OT] Recreating nmap

["Seymour, Keith" <KESeymour () magellanhealth com>]

I believe that it would be very difficult to re-write nmap, but who would
try?

Personally I work in computers because I'm lazy. If a program gets deleted
accidentally I don't rewrite it, I restore it from a backup tape. How would
someone propose to remove all of the copies of nmap that exist? Even if a
government decided to write a worm to find and delete nmap installs /
binaries / source code how could it find all the copies? On backup tape,
hard drives, diskettes, CD-ROMS. I have to go with Dan on this one - can't
be done. 

"Contrary to the popular belief that it's hard to recover
information, it's actually starting to appear that it's
very hard to remove something even if you want to."
- Dan Farmer

Keith

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Stewart [mailto:gis () staffmail ed ac uk]
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 12:12 PM
To: nmap-dev () insecure org
Subject: [OT] Recreating nmap


First of, my apologies for joining this list only to start of by posting
an off topic discussion.

I am required to hold a debate as part of my course at university. The
debate I decided to go for is a discussion on the European Union
discussing the banning of such tools as nmap. Though I think such a
legislation would be foolish, hypothetically, assuming not only Europe but
the whole world followed suite my question would be:

Do you, as developers, think you would be able to recreate nmap or a
reduced version of it from memory?

Of course attempting to stop distribution of scanning programs won't be
easy and really it is going to harm system admins more than people who are
going to use it to break into systems, but that's really for my report to
address.

Thanks for any help,

Gary


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