
Summary
The NASL, similar to and spawned from Network Associates, Inc.’s (NAI’s) Custom
Audit Scripting Language (CASL), was designed to power the vulnerability assessment
backend of the freeware Nessus project (www.nessus.org).The Nessus project, started in
1998 by Renaud Deraison, was and still remains the most dominant freeware solution to
vulnerability assessment and management. While Nessus utilizes Networked Messaging
Application Protocol (NMAP) to invoke most of its host-identification and port-scan-
ning capabilities, it pulls from a global development community to launch the plethora
of scripts that can identify ranges of vulnerabilities including ...