|
Design Goals
The design goal of SAINT was not to solve any one single security
problem. Rather, WWDSI's goal was to combine a suite of freely
available, state-of-the-art software tools with WWDSI's own extensive
security knowledge into one comprehensive package. Specifically,
SAINT was designed to:
- Use the traditional Unix toolbox approach of program design.
- Use as many freely available software tools that were currently
useful and available to cut down development time to a minimum.
- Design a security package that was educational as well as useful.
- Create a tool that was freely available to anyone who wanted to use it.
- Discover and uncover as much security and network information as
possible without being destructive.
- Create the best investigative security network tool available, at any price.
Toolkit approach
As mentioned earlier, heavy emphasis was placed on the traditional
UNIX toolkit approach to program designing. As with many programs
of this size and scope, SAINT is modular, made up of many smaller programs.
Speed/optimization
Optimizing SAINT for speed of execution was not much of a design
consideration. It was designed to be an information gathering tool
that would be run periodically. A fairly large network (say, a
thousand nodes) can be scanned in several hours. In all likelihood, the
majority of time consumed when using SAINT will be deciding on what
actions to take based on the results that were found. In any case, the
network timeouts and uncertainties make real optimization very
difficult. Fortunately, PERL was fast enough to make
performance a non-issue for most network queries and work. However,
with the introduction of firewalls into the equation, the issue of speed
becomes even less important. In order to do a thorough job, sufficient
time must be allowed to detect all targets in a firewalled environment
and to run the necessary probes against them.
Back to the Introductory TOC/Index
|