[SARA IMAGE]Design Goals


SARA was created to provide updated SATAN functionality to the mainstream security community. With the optional report writer, SARA provides excellent networking scanning capabilities without the associated cost of commercial packages. SARA/SATAN design goals were:

Toolkit approach

It would be cost prohibitive to write all of the functionality necessary to make SARA work. We decided from the start to use as much information, tools, and methodologies from the OpenSource/GPL community as possible to create SARA. In particular, using perl and the HTML interface were vital to the completion of the package.

Speed/optimization

Optimizing SARA 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 SARA 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 (thanks, Larry!) to make performance a non-issue for most network queries and work.
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