Introducing Recon

Need a schmancy, new GUI for Nmap? Got Leopard? Give Recon a try.

Recon is open source. This means I want you to help me improve it. To help you get started, here’s an overview of the Recon object model.

Fig. 1: Recon Object Graph

The primary object controller is MyDocument (Recon started life as an Core Data Persistent Document. It’s windowControllerDidLoadNib: is effectively your int main().

MyDocument configures the Core Data persistent store, and instantiates a SessionManager object.

Fig. 2: SessionManager Interaction Through Session Drawer

The SessionManager (SM) object creates a SessionController queue and allows the user to Run/Abort/Delete SessionController objects residing in the queue.

Fig 3: SessionManager Queue Controllers

After the user selects a profile and enters a target, they click the queueSession: button. The SessionManager then instantiates a new SessionController (SC) object and adds it to the queue.

Upon instantiate, the SessionController, itself, instantiates an:

ArgumentListGenerator, which converts the selected scan profile into a string of Nmap arguments flags.
NmapController, which instantiates an NSTask with the user-specified nmap binary and argument string from above.
XMLController, which parses the Nmap output XML file, and populates the Core Data Store with the results.

The SC handles the sequence of events which invokes its three sub-controllers, and handles any errors that may occur.

The SessionControllers sit dormant in the SM queue, waiting for a signal to actually perform the scan.

Fig 4: SessionManager processQueue:

When the user chooses to process the session queue, the processQueue: method is envoked in the SessionManager. The SM iterates through the SessionController queue, executing a startScan: in FIFO fashion.

Each SC tells its corresponding NmapController (NC) to startScan: and waits for a notification indicating that the NC’s NSTask has returned. If the scan went well, a successfulRunNotification: is sent back to the appropriate SessionController.

If an SC receives a successfulRunNotification:, it reads the nmap output file path from the NC returned in the [notification object]. This output file path is then passed to an XMLController, which parses the output and inserts the scan results into the Core Data Store.

The SC then sends a successfulRunNotification: to the SessionManager, which dequeues the SessionController.

The functional flow is fairly straightforward for other interaction cases.