Re: multi-threaded Nmap

[Jacky Jack <jacksonsmth698 () gmail com>]

@Kamal Banga

Good idea and initiative.

I don't deny that performance is a desirable thing. However, for NMap, users
would prefer accuracy to performance.
I'm afraid that such multi-threading might cause problems/instability for
Nmap and its management of plugins and Plugins vs NMap core communications.

I suggest you pick up an older version (stable if u want) of Nmap source
code. Try adding multi-threading to see if this works well.



On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 11:16 PM, David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 08:30:53PM +0530, Kamal Banga wrote:
> > I am a second year CSE student. I have seen that many-a-times nmap users
> > have to do intense scans. I know CUDA and a bit about multithreaded
> > programming. How about developing multithreaded code for nmap. And after
> all
> > it will be a brand image for nmap! as now-a-days softwares use it. Like
> > Matlab is available in both single and multi threaded applications.
>
> That's an interesting idea. You would have to make a very convincing
> case that it would be worth it, though. Not only Nmap but other
> high-performance network software is written single-threaded with
> asynchronous I/O. Nmap doesn't do very much that is CPU-bound, so a
> potential benefit of threads (easily taking advantage of multiple
> processors) is lost.
>
> However I don't mean to discourage you. There may be a place for forms
> or parallelism that we aren't using now. Maybe simple online hash
> cracking for the future dns-nsec3-enum script
> (https://secwiki.org/w/Nmap/Script_Ideas#dns-nsec3-enum)? You just have
> to justify it in your proposal. I suggest that you read scan_engine.cc
> and nsock/src/nsock_core.c to see examples of parallel programming
> without threads.
>
> David Fifield
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