Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine

Nmap is a well-known security tool used by penetration testers and system administrators. Nmap was one of 40 open source projects that Google selected for their first Summer of Code program in 2007. The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) has added the ability to perform additional tasks on target hosts. Tasks such as advanced fingerprinting and service discovery, information gathering, and even detection and exploitation of security vulnerabilities are now made possible by allowing developers to use LUA to write their own scripts.

This book will teach you everything you need to know to master the Nmap Scripting Engine by developing your own NSE scripts. It covers all the important topics, from the fundamentals of LUA programming to the most obscure NSE functionality.

The book starts by covering the fundamentals of LUA programming and reviews the syntax used by NSE scripts. After that, it covers the most important features of NSE. It jumps right into coding practical scripts and explains how to use the Nmap API and the available NSE libraries to produce robust scripts that will help penetration testers and system administrators in their daily tasks.

The book then moves on to cover advanced usage, string handling, network I/O, and parallelism.

With this book, readers will learn with complete and practical examples, the built-in functions and libraries that they will need when developing NSE scripts with the help of complete and practical examples. You will learn about customizing Nmap databases, reporting, advanced version detection, binary string handling, network sockets, and parallelism.

"Mastering Nmap Scripting Engine" is a book that will familiarize Nmap users with the programming language, script format and functionality available in NSE. This book is a must-have book for those who wish to start writing their own NSE scripts.

Paulino Calderon Pale

Paulino Calderon Pale (@calderpwn) lives on a Caribbean island in Mexico called Cozumel. He is the cofounder of Websec, a company offering information security consulting services in Mexico and Canada. He learned how to program and administer IT infrastructures early in his life, and these skills came in handy when he joined the information security industry. Today, he loves learning about new technologies and penetration testing, conducting data gathering experiments, and developing software. He also loves to attend technology events and has given speeches and held workshops at over a dozen of them in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Colombia. In the summer of 2011, Paulino joined Google's Summer of Code event to work on the Nmap project as an NSE developer. He focused on improving the web scanning capabilities of Nmap and has kept on contributing to the project since then.