Download Nessus 3.0.2

Nessus is a security scanner that can scan a network for known exploits and open services. Please note that the program may only be used if you have permission to check the security of the network. The long list exploits and outstanding services can be further expanded with own written scripts. At the moment there are two branches that are being worked on. Namely the old and trusted 2.2.x branch and the new 3.0.x branch that only works on Linux and FreeBSD. This last branch has been largely rewritten and unfortunately is no longer released as open source, why the developers have taken this step is over this page to read. The developers released version 3.0.2 with the following announcement:

Version 3.0.2:

Tenable is happy to announce the availability of Nessus 3.0.2. Nessus 3.0.2 provides further improvements over the previous release, and also fixes several bugs.

nessusd:
• Fixed a problem causing the scan to hang if max_checks was set to a value which is way too high
• Plugged a small memory leak occuring when re-using the same connection to perform an additional scan
• Plugged a small memory leak in the plugins scheduler
• Fixed bug#1426 (crash on startup when processing a malformed nessusd.conf file)
• Improved the ‘default’ list of ports to scan with a new file ‘nessus-services’

nessus:

• ‘nessus -V’ (verbose) works again

nasl:

• A new function, inject_packet(), can write directly to layer 2
• The function ‘end_denial()’ would not work when used in command-line mode
• Fixed a potential bus error occurring on memory exhaustion
• Fixed an integer overflow causing a segfault when processing some kind of malformed script

libnessus:

• Fixed a bug in the SSL transport layer which may cause find_services.nes to hang longer than expected on SSL_read()
• Fixed the function in charge of getting the list of network interfaces which would get a wrong netmask when dealing with an interface alias

plugins:

• Fixed several bugs in find_services.c which would not properly set the key Transport/SSL or which may read some data beyond its buffer
• Fixed a bad #if/#endif clause in nessus_tcp_scanner.c which prevented it from recomputing the RTT, hence negatively impacting the performance
• nmap.nasl has been removed from the main distribution (to use nmap from within Nessus, read this page)

Version 3.0.1:

Nessus 3.0.1 (build 114) is now available on our web sites.

improvements:
• Lighter resources consumption of the master processes, which in turn improve scalability (one has to account for ~ 6 megabytes of RAM per host tested in parallel)
• Reduce the CPU usage of nessusd when the only running plugin is executing a local command
• Improved the timing of synscan.nes which could result in very long (nearly infinite in time) port scans
• Slightly faster (~20%) initial processing of the plugins

bug fixes:

• When nessusd updates itself, the process now restarts properly
• Fixed the error message “Warning this scanner seems to be using the plugin feed of another host” which would sometimes be displayed when the nessusd host changes of IP addresses
• Fixed a NULL pointer dereferencement which may happen in some cases when dealing with shared sockets

Other:

• Removed bogus warning messages occuring when max_checks is set to a very high value (which is not a good idea in the first place — max_checks should be set to 4 most of the time)
• KB files of hosts which are dead are not saved on disk (as they are empty)
• Re-introduced HTML export, due to popular demand
• The RPMs have stronger dependencies set
• The SuSE 9.3 build is now linked to the default libdb 4.3

Version 3.0.0:

Nessus 3 is a complete rewrite of the Nessus engine, designed for speed and efficiency — as a result, Nessus 3 is on average twice as fast as Nessus 2, (with spikes as high as five times faster) and less resource intensive.

The Nessus 3 major enhancements are the following:
• New NASL3 engine
• Improved plugin storage for faster startup time
• Improved networking functions
• New scanner architecture to be both efficient and robust
• The Nessus daemon fetches the plugins automatically when registered (this can be disabled in nessusd.conf)
• Improved error handling

Nessus 3 is available on the following platforms:

• RedHat ES3 and ES4
• SuSE 9.3 and 10.0
• FreeBSD 5 and 6
• Fedora Core 4
• Debian 3.1

The following platforms will be supported in early 2006:

• Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4
• Microsoft Windows 2000/XP Pro/2003
• Solaris 9 and 10

We are also extending the service we offer to our direct feed customers to include full email support, with access to our customer portal which gives users the ability to reset their activation codes, track their support tickets, and have access to the Nessus Support Knowledge base .