Re: Google SoC ideas

[David Warde-Farley <david.warde.farley () utoronto ca>]

On 24-Apr-06, at 5:41 PM, Arthur Amarra wrote:

> (sorry Adrian for accidentally sending just to you)
>
> Hi,
> Another of my ideas is to incorporate a "traceroute" function to  
> Nmap, so a user will have the option of displaying the route taken  
> before scanning a host/hosts. To get through most firewalls,  
> something like "tcptraceroute" could be used, since some hosts  
> block ICMP echo requests or UDP, which is used by normal  
> traceroute. Tcptraceroute (and normal traceroute) is invaluable in  
> my network troubleshooting toolkit, since I can traceroute to any  
> tcp port. Would adding this to Nmap be feature bloat? Nessus  
> already has the traceroute feature(not sure if regular or tcp- 
> traceroute) but I like to use Nmap more;)  Should these features be  
> in another tool altogether? Any thoughts on this would be welcome.

Arthur: Another tool you might try is Layer Four Traceroute (LFT),  
http://pwhois.org/lft/ . It proved invaluable on one project I worked  
on, where tcptraceroute turned out (for some reason I can't remember  
at the moment) to be insufficient. I think tcptraceroute had some  
problems compiling on BSD at the time, as well.

On one hand, it would add something to the "map" part of Nmap (since  
maps usually include paths taken ;) ). On the other hand, if there  
are good tools to do this out there in the open source world, why  
bother? (Maybe the existing tools /aren't/ that great, I'm not an  
authority in the least).

To be honest, I've been racking my brain trying to think of something  
creative to do with Nmap or something related that hasn't been done  
already. Since I started grokking the -dev mailing list during last  
year's SoC buildup, I've watched it mature so much through the hard  
work of so many talented people that I keep drawing blanks for  
something I could reasonably implement this year. Likewise, Ncat  
(though I haven't yet actually /used/ it) seems to have fulfilled all  
the dreams that got thrown around on the nmap-soc list last year :) I  
actually look forward to trying out the connection brokering business  
- if it's what I think it is then that's really awesome.

Anyway, good luck to anyone applying. I'll submit something if I can  
think of a project idea (or reasonably think I'm qualified to  
implement any of Fyodor's ideas this time around).

David


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