A fully functional web interface (NessusWeb) for the Nessus network security scanner has been developed. NessusWeb provides public accessibility for authorized users and supports SSL communication, multiple sessions and centralized scan configurations and management of scan reports. It was created using a multi-tier distributed architecture. The client tier is a web browser. The Apache Secure Web Server including Apache HTTP server and Tomcat serves as the web tier. As a servlet engine, Tomcat is used to generate dynamic web content and monitor the Nessusd server through the SSL channel using the NTP (Nessus Transport Protocol). The Nessusd server forms the business tier, which performs the actual network security scans. User scan configurations and network vulnerability scan results generated by the Nessusd server are saved into a MySQL database, which provides the back-end storage. Two user interfaces were implemented, one for the administrator and one for all other users. This pape...
Chuming Chen, Manton M. Matthews