Mailing List Archive: Nessus: devel

Ann: Plan for major GUI re-design and other improvements of nessus

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jan at intevation

Aug 11, 2004, 8:48 AM

Post #1 of 3 (705 views)
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Ann: Plan for major GUI re-design and other improvements of nessus

Dear nessus developers,

the German BSI (Federal Office for Information Security)
contracted us (the companies Intevation and DN-Systems
Enterprise Internet Solutions) to develop an easy-to-use
security analysis system as Free Software under GNU GPL
additionally localized for German language.

BSI wants this solution primarily for its own purposes
and for other authorities for which they are some kind of
service provider.

Our plan is to not develop a system anew but to build upon
Nessus instead. This gives us now the opportunity to
contribute all developments to the Nessus project.

Thus note that BSI did not contract for Nessus development
officially. It just happens that our works can be
incorporated. Please keep BSI's role low - I do not want
the press or other people to draw a wrong picture.

The title of our project is "BOSS".

The core features planned are:
- I18N (gettext) for client and server including full
translation into German (but excluding a translation
of the plugins for now)
- re-design the client GUI and extend it with e.g. menus,
toolbar and tree-structure for input/output data.
- migrate to GTK2
- make sure the client works on Microsoft Windows as well
- extended report generation (PDF)

Furthermore we plan to create another component that we call
SLAD, Security Local Auditing Daemon. SLAD can be installed
on GNU/Linux systems and run tools like John-the-Ripper,
chkrootkit, virus scanners or tripwire. A module for nessusd
will make the management of this available for the nessus
client.

We will do all developments openly and welcome any
discussion, comments and suggestions from the current
development team.

So far, we would like to avoid our project to be announced
to the press. We prefer to have solid first results first.

Note that we also contracted Renaud for supporting us in
conceptual and technical questions, i.e. to tell us what
could go into main development or what would be rejected.

All the best

Jan (BOSS Project Coordinator)

--
Jan-Oliver Wagner http://intevation.de/~jan/

Intevation GmbH http://intevation.de/

dave at cirt

Aug 11, 2004, 11:45 AM

Post #2 of 3 (661 views)
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Re: Ann: Plan for major GUI re-design and other improvements of nessus [In reply to]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 16:48, Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote:
> The core features planned are:
> - I18N (gettext) for client and server including full
> translation into German (but excluding a translation
> of the plugins for now)

Please; please allow more than just 'de' and American i18n modules - I'm
getting sick of programs only written in wrong English :-)

Is this going to interface with one of the other translation projects --
such as the GTP or the TP to maintain the .po files?

Nessus in Olde Englisc here we come!

> - re-design the client GUI and extend it with e.g. menus,
> toolbar and tree-structure for input/output data.
> - migrate to GTK2
> - make sure the client works on Microsoft Windows as well
> - extended report generation (PDF)

Why not just do a web version? This would provide better flexibility
from more than just GTK and Windows - and would allow me to use lynx
from my A&P laptop...

> Furthermore we plan to create another component that we call
> SLAD, Security Local Auditing Daemon. SLAD can be installed
> on GNU/Linux systems and run tools like John-the-Ripper,
> chkrootkit, virus scanners or tripwire. A module for nessusd
> will make the management of this available for the nessus
> client.

I've often thought of writing my own version of this idea, but one needs
to ensure that the scope is good and it is extendible so that easy
checks can be added for, for example, patches, dodgy files, user
settings.

What OSes is SLAD going to support? Just having Linux is not all that
useful.

dave

jan at intevation

Aug 11, 2004, 1:38 PM

Post #3 of 3 (665 views)
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Re: Ann: Plan for major GUI re-design and other improvements of nessus [In reply to]

Hi David,

On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 07:45:11PM +0100, David Lodge wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 16:48, Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote:
> > The core features planned are:
> > - I18N (gettext) for client and server including full
> > translation into German (but excluding a translation
> > of the plugins for now)
>
> Please; please allow more than just 'de' and American i18n modules - I'm
> getting sick of programs only written in wrong English :-)

with gettext technology you can apply various translations even
various styles of english. And various styles of german ;-)

> Is this going to interface with one of the other translation projects --
> such as the GTP or the TP to maintain the .po files?

You mean the GNOME Translation Project?

Well, I think it will work as for many other projects: translations will
be maintained in CVS of nessus. I am not really a friend of giving
translation tasks to a non-expert i18n-Team. I have some bad experience
with the security-relevant KDE translations where german terms have been
mixed up. I better don't think about the other 40+ languages ...

> > - re-design the client GUI and extend it with e.g. menus,
> > toolbar and tree-structure for input/output data.
> > - migrate to GTK2
> > - make sure the client works on Microsoft Windows as well
> > - extended report generation (PDF)
>
> Why not just do a web version? This would provide better flexibility
> from more than just GTK and Windows - and would allow me to use lynx
> from my A&P laptop...

A web-browser based user interface simply has not the same usability
as a desktop application. However, web-based solutions are not a bad
idea but out of scope of our project.

> > Furthermore we plan to create another component that we call
> > SLAD, Security Local Auditing Daemon. SLAD can be installed
> > on GNU/Linux systems and run tools like John-the-Ripper,
> > chkrootkit, virus scanners or tripwire. A module for nessusd
> > will make the management of this available for the nessus
> > client.
>
> I've often thought of writing my own version of this idea, but one needs
> to ensure that the scope is good and it is extendible so that easy
> checks can be added for, for example, patches, dodgy files, user
> settings.
>
> What OSes is SLAD going to support? Just having Linux is not all that
> useful.

It will only be GNU/Linux platforms we can test within the scope
of our project, namely Debian, ReadHat and SUSE.

Best

Jan

--
Jan-Oliver Wagner http://intevation.de/~jan/

Intevation GmbH http://intevation.de/
FreeGIS http://freegis.org/

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