NSE Infrastructure: Eliminate script.db

[Kris Katterjohn <katterjohn () gmail com>]

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Hey everyone,

I tend to write quite a few pretty simple NSE scripts to interact with
something, or to test something, or whatever it may call for.

Unfortunately, everytime I write a new script I have to set NMAPDIR and
use -script-updatedb to update the script database in my nmap
directory--for a lot of simple scripts this gets old :).  The Metasploit
Framework seems to build their "database" of exploits, payloads, etc.
straight from the directory structure rather than from a database file.

I was thinking that Nmap could use the steps it takes to build the
database file, but instead of writing to the script.db it could just
build the internal list of scripts (or however it works--I'm not
well-versed in the innards of NSE).  This would eliminate the
- -script-updatedb option and the script.db.

This way, all that's needed for a script to be available to Nmap is for
it to the placed in the directory.  This makes for a lot simpler use of
new scripts.

Are there details I am missing that makes this infeasible for NSE?  The
NSE usage [1] says: "For efficiency reasons, NSE generates a script.db
file which maps categories to the scripts they contain," so is the
script.db for efficiency in this respect?  Running -script-updatedb
seems instantaneous, so perhaps I'm mistaken by what the usage refers to
(although it could mean in the future when there are many more scripts)?

I figure this could make a good NSE Infrastructure SoC project if it's
any good.

Thanks,
Kris Katterjohn

[1] http://nmap.org/nse/nse-usage.html

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