Persistent NSE registry

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

Hi,

Currently the NSE registry doesn't persist across host groups, the
chunks of varying size that Nmap processes sequentially. You can see
this by running an experiment like

        nmap --script=whois -sP --max-hostgroup 3 stanford.edu/28

whois.nse caches results in the registry. The whois results are the same
for each host, so ideally you should see the results for one host and
all the rest should say "See the result for 171.67.22.XX." But because
we've limited the size of host groups to 3, every third host requires a
whois query and prints duplicate information.

I made a simple change to keep the registry in between host groups. I'm
posting it here to solicit comments and see if there are any side
effects. All I do is initialize a single Lua state the first time
scritp_scan is called, and keep using it thereafter. This also avoid
reinitializing the script arguments every time. Previously a new state
was created for each host group.

I would make some more changes before committing this for good, like
picking a better name for the L state as it won't be a local variable
any more. Is there any cruft that has to be cleaned out in between host
groups?

David Fifield

Attachment: nse-persistent-registry.diff
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