python-nessus-client

Python Client for Nessus 5.0 REST API.

Nessus is a proprietary comprehensive vulnerability scanner which is developed by Tenable Network Security. It is free of charge for personal use in a non-enterprise environment.

Documentation

Documentation is available online at http://python-nessus-client.readthedocs.org and in the docs directory.

Installation

Install using pip

pip install python-nessus-client

Examples

REST resources are translated to methods.

For example:

Resource	Method
/users/list	object.users.list()
/server/securesettings/&proxy%5Fport=8888	object.server.securesettings(proxy_port='8888')

and so on...

To get users list https://nessus.example.com:8834/users/list we call list() method on Users class

>>> from nessus import API
>>> nessus = API('https://127.0.0.1:8834', username='user', password='pass')
>>> print nessus.users.list()
[
  {
    "admin": "TRUE",
    "name": "test",
    "lastlogin": 1416492416
  }
]

To get server security settings list https://nessus.example.com:8834/server/securesettings/list we call securesettings() method on Server class

>>> from nessus import API
>>> nessus = API('https://127.0.0.1:8834', username='user', password='pass')
>>> print nessus.server.securesettings()
{
  "proxysettings": {
    "proxy_password": null,
    "proxy_port": "8080",
    "custom_host": null,
    "proxy_username": null,
    "user_agent": null,
    "proxy": "10.0.0.1"
  }
}

To set server security settings https://nessus.example.com:8834/server/securesettings we use the same securesettings() method on Server class but we pass as a argument settings to set up.

>>> from nessus import API
>>> nessus = API('https://127.0.0.1:8834', username='user', password='pass')
>>> nessus.server.securesettings(proxy_port='8081')
>>> print nessus.server.securesettings()
{
  "proxysettings": {
    "proxy_password": null,
    "proxy_port": "8081",
    "custom_host": null,
    "proxy_username": null,
    "user_agent": null,
    "proxy": "10.0.0.1"
  }
}

More examples can be found in the following subsections and in class documentation.

Authenticating a user

Login to Nessus server

>>> from nessus import API
>>> nessus = API('https://127.0.0.1:8834', username='user', password='pass')

Response is Python structure

We can acts like we work with dict.

Get configuration value

>>> print nessus.server.securesettings()['proxysettings']['proxy_port']
8080

Get name from second item in report list get list of hosts contained in a specified report

>>> second_host = nessus.report.list()[1]['name']
>>> print nessus.report.hosts(second_host)
{
  "scanprogresscurrent": "0",
  "scanprogresstotal": "100",
  (...)
}

Make output more readable

# before
>>> print nessus.server.securesettings()
{u'proxysettings': {u'proxy_password': None, u'proxy_port': u'8080', (...)
# after
>>> import json
>>> data = nessus.server.securesettings()
>>> json.dumps(data, indent=2)
{
  "proxysettings": {
    "proxy_password": null,
    "proxy_port": "8080",
    "custom_host": null,
    "proxy_username": null,
    "user_agent": null,
    "proxy": "10.0.0.1"
  }
}

Check if report has audit trail

>>> nessus.report.has_audit_trail(name)
True
>>> if nessus.report.has_audit_trail(name):
>>>    print 'Report {} has audit trail'.format(name)
Report 95c309f8-2578-fd3e-9e4d-a8aa6d6511e8b617b5a088c93309 has audit trail

Create new scan

# make list with hosts
>>> target = ['localhost', 'example.com']
>>> nessus.scan.new(target, 'test', '-37')