studies/papers/etc. on getting best results w. nmap?

["^..^" <zenfish () gmail com>]

Hey folks -

Have there been any studies done on the accuracy of nmap, or ways to improve the same?  I've done a bit of searching 
but certain types of things are harder to find than others, and nmap shows up everywhere for just about any search term 
;)  If I've missed anything obvious, my apologies, an RTFM or link would be awesome.

 I'm on a project where many of the targets are probably behind firewalls/network devices, and I've 3 very basic q's.   
I'd love to be pointed at any discussions or papers on any of theem (or feel free to speak up with your own opinions ;) 
  As a test I've started assigning weights to various results (e.g. closed is more closed than filtered), and it's 
showing at least some promise.

1) Any references on whether closed (or other results) are more open/closed than all the various outputs you can get - 
e.g. filtered, close|filtered, etcetera.

2) And are there any archives/talks/papers/DBs about what individual routers/fw implementations tend to return?  E.g. 
"cisco's tend to return closed|filtered where junipers tend to use "open|filtered" or anything?

3) Purely based on my own tests over the years I believe pretty strongly that I get different results when scanning 
from different OS's (e.g. scanning from Linux vs. OS X, with all other factors taken under consideration), and some 
scans are faster - at times substantially so - on one vs. the other.  Are some OS's (and/or versions within, aka 64 vs. 
32 bit, or using different compilers, having more memory, whatever) seen as better nmap scanners than others?  It'd be 
nice to be able to optimize for nmap scanning, or even some types of scanning.  If there were a place to dump results 
of various sorts of scans I'd certainly contribute my own timings and such.   (I think this question is independent of 
the performance tips @ http://nmap.org/book/man-performance.html, but presumably some options there work better in some 
situations as well.)

Thanks for all the hard work on nmap!

dan

^..^

_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/