Nessus 2.0.8 is available ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm pleased to announce the Nessus 2.0.8 is available for download now. I was very happy with 2.0.7 stability-wise (there is no major issue in this release that I can think of), but found that it was a little slow against some hosts. After an extensive analysis of the plugin management code, I noticed a buglet which would not make nessusd use all the potential the user asked for (ie: when the user asks for ~ 5 plugins in parallel, nessusd would sometimes only launch 3). This has been fixed and this improves the performance greatly. I also spotted a couple of other performance-related issues in the plugins which have been fixed (so if you use nessus-update-plugins, you should have noticed that Nessus has been a bit faster against web servers these last days). Apart from the performance gains, the most noticeable difference is also the addition of the function script_xref() in NASL scripts. This will allow us to write scripts that will keep track of third-parties references, such as CERT advisories. As a result, the format of the table issues by nessus -qSp has changed slightly to add a new column. The details of the changes of 2.0.8 are : o Improved plugins dependencies o Improved some plugins performances o Better default values for nessusd.conf o Fixed insert_ip_options() which was broken o Fixed a bottleneck in the plugins process manager which would sometimes not properly distribute the work among the plugins, thus resulting in a slower test o Added the function script_xref() in NASL scripts o Multiple minor bugfixes o When connecting to SSL servers, Nessus now attempts to use SSLv2 by default (instead of TLSv1), as the handshake takes less time Nessus 2.0.8 is available at http://ftp.nessus.org/pub/nessus/nessus-2.0.8/ and http://www.nessus.org/nessus_2_0.html Nessus 2.1.x developement has started ! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am also pleased to announce that the developement of Nessus 2.1.x has started, and will eventually result in the release of Nessus 2.2.0 when it is ready. Most of the work in Nessus 2.1.x will be (again) devoted to improving the performances, reducing the overhead on the tested networks, and improve the reporting. Note that since the 2.1.x developement started, if you follow the CVS tree, you need to switch to the NESSUS_2_0 branch if you want to use the stable branch. Note that there's no NESSUS_2_0 branch for nessus-plugins at this time, which simplifies the developement for us. We are aiming at a quite short developement time for Nessus 2.2.x, and in any case, the transition between Nessus 2.0.x to 2.2.x will be much easier than 1.2.x to 2.0.x.
