Re: OpenVAS plans to integrate NSE support

["Jan-Oliver Wagner" <Jan-Oliver.Wagner () greenbone net>]

On Friday 26 February 2010 19:33:08 David Fifield wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 07:16:03AM -0600, Ron wrote:
> > At this point, I think what you're saying is a major weakness of
> > Zenmap -- it has no way to prompt the user for the proper parameters
> > for scripts, it expects users to just know. Maybe it's something we
> > can explore in Zenmap as well?
>
> This is a TODO item already. You're right, it would be great if the
> profile editor could show the documentation for each script, and
> automatically parse out the possible script arguments and make text
> boxes to fill in.
>
> I think this could be done tolerably well through scraping of the script
> source code. Zenmap and OpenVAS wouldn't have to have a Lua interpreter.

It would be great to avoid to run our own lua interpreter.
Actually, for OVAL we do run an interpreter, but it is the already built-in
XML parser.

Ages ago I implemented the "--interface-description" feature for GRASS
which is a collection of several hundred command line tools. The output is a generic
XML description of the input parameters (title, type, defaults, etc).
This was the base for building a generic GUI on top to drive any of the tools.
Perhaps a similar concept makes sense for the NSEs and Zenmap?

All the best

        Jan

-- 
Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner |  ++49-541-335084-0  |  http://www.greenbone.net/
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