It would be possible to write Nessus in Java, although you would have to use the JNI to develop libraries to access low-level functions like raw sockets and libpcap. The question is really of suitibility. The Java libraries are generally a bit too high-level for coding security tools. For example, the SSL libraries wrap do various certificate checking operations for you - great for most applications but no good for security tools. Also, a fair chunk of Nessus is the NASL interpreter, and it is generally a bad idea to write an interpreter in anything other than a true compiled language like C.
Some on the list will remember I was one of a "small but vocal" group advocating the use of Python over NASL. I still see some merit in this - potentially the whole tool, plugins and all could be written in this language, and it already has many good libraries like pcapy, impacket, scapy, etc. Ultimately choices were made and we have a Nessus that works very well - I certainly wouldn't now advocate ditching what we have to start again.
Who are you anyway? You've been asking a fair few searching questions on this list.
Paul
alan donald wrote:
Hi. Please bear with me since I think this is the best place this question can be answered although I know this forumn may not be for questions like these.
My question is very basic in nature. So forgive me for being naive.
I wanted to know why java is not used to make
softwares like nessus or nmap. Is it because it may
not have the ability to make packets. Is there any
such library(and to what extent can it be used) that
can be leveraged in java which can help make a
software like those mentioned above.
Plus I have not seen java being used for such
softwares. Rather C or perl seems to be a more common
option. Can you shed some light on this too.
Thanks.
Regards, Alan
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