Nmap Development mailing list archives
Jay's Status Report #1 of 13
From: Jay Bosamiya <jaybosamiya () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 19:11:33 +0530
Hi All! This week was quite good and I think that it has set a nice pace for the rest of the GSoC. Achievements: 1. Fixed the (rather very irritating) bug in Nmap that prevented it from being able to accept any runtime interaction when run from sudo or from a shell script. This entailed writing a signal handler to be able to cleanly give back control while still being able to preserve the ability to core dump, etc. Learnt a lot about tty's and signals in the process. 2. Made multiple commits (r32873 for fixing the sudo bug (above), r32881 for adding a feature to Ncat (details below), r32887 for fixing some formatting in the code which I noticed when I was reading nping/utils.cc, r32893 to ignore the Makefile generated at nsock/tests/ when we run the ./configure script). 3. Ncat, when compiled without OpenSSL, used to just say "unrecognized option" when any --ssl option(s) were used. This used to cause confusion for users (see [1] for an example). I rectified this. It now shows a relevant error message and then quits. 4. Nmap has had a --data-length option for sending random data as payload to the sent packets. I wrote a patch that adds a --comment option to send user specified data instead. I got reviews of this patch saying that a better idea would be to write --data <hex string> and --data-string <string> options (similar to nping). I have rewritten the patch with this change and it is waiting for comments. (Thread at [2]) 5. I had put in a patch for updating libpcap to 1.5.3 back in March, but it was too large a patch (just over 1 MB), so could not be reviewed or committed. I have rewritten the patch into a much smaller thing (barely 6 kB), but this raised the question of whether we really want to continue to bundle along 3rd party libraries with Nmap or not. Waiting for a discussion on this. (Thread at [3]) 6. Discussed with Daniel Miller, my mentor for GSoC 2014, as to what I should be working on next. 7. Rewired my whole development environment to be more Nmap focused. This included writing scripts etc. so as to be able to work much better and faster. Priorities: 1. Work on Zenmap to catch the Memory Error and give a message to the user indicating the problem. This should reduce the number of out-of-memory crash reports that we get on nmap-dev. Once I'm done with this, I may try working on reducing Zenmap's memory footprint. 2. Investigate report of Nmap ARP discovery using the wrong target MAC address field in ARP requests. I seem to have fixed the MAC address now, but I need to run more tests and make sure that the modifications don't break any of Nmap's other routines. 3. Try to see how some of the other patches that I have submitted should be modified (if required) so that they can get committed in. This can be done only if I get some feedback or reviews on the patches. 4. Reread through Nmap's code related to the actual scans. This will help me later on for some tasks that I have set, including adding a --exclude-ports option (this seems to be one that has quite a lot of people requesting for it) and to consider implementing a binary decision diagram for --exclude to make it more efficient for large lists. Oh, and btw, I have also started off a formal log of all the mini-projects I work on at [4]. This will have a very updated list of all the mini projects that I am working on or have worked on as well as a moderately detailed description of the progress of each. Cheers, Jay Links: [1] http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2013/q3/579 [2] http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2014/q2/345 [3] http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2014/q2/341 [4] https://gist.github.com/jaybosamiya/be2cbf25eb84851c32c9 _______________________________________________ Sent through the dev mailing list http://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/dev Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/
Current thread:
- Jay's Status Report #1 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (May 26)
- Jay's Status Report #2 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (Jun 02)
- Jay's Status Report #3 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (Jun 09)
- Re: Jay's Status Report #3 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (Jun 16)
- Jay's Status Report #4 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (Jun 16)
- Jay's Status Report #5 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (Jun 23)
- Jay's Status Report #6 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (Jun 30)
- Jay's Status Report #3 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (Jun 09)
- Jay's Status Report #2 of 13 Jay Bosamiya (Jun 02)