Some of highlights are:
o Dramatically improved the version detection database, integrating
2,596 submissions that users contributed since February 3, 2009!
o Added 7 new NSE scripts for a grand total of 79!
o Performed a memory consumption audit and made changes to
dramatically reduce Nmap's footprint.
o A major service detection submission integration.
o Added some new service detection probes
o Added 14 new NSE scripts for a grand total of 72! You can learn
about them all at http://nmap.org/nsedoc/. Here are the new ones:
o Nmap's --traceroute has been rewritten for better performance.
o Integrated 1,349 fingerprints (and 81 corrections).
o [NSE] Default socket parallelism has been doubled from 10 to 20.
o [NSE] Now supports worker threads
o Zenmap now includes ports in the services view whenever Nmap found
them "interesting," whatever their state.
o [Ncat, Ndiff] The exit codes of these programs now reflect whether
they succeeded.
o Optimize MAC address prefix lookup by using an std::map
o Canonicalized the list of OS detection device types to a smaller set.
o Zenmap's UI performance has improved significantly.
o [NSE] socket garbage collection was rewritten for better performance.
Many many bugfixes!
For full changelog, see http://nmap.org/changelog.html
Ok'ed during freeze by wiz@
Fix for PR#41506
Fix missing @dirrm entries from PLIST*
Before we go into the detailed changes, here are the top 5 improvements in Nmap 5:
1. The new Ncat tool aims to be your Swiss Army Knife for data transfer, redirection, and debugging. We released a whole users' guide detailing security testing and network administration tasks made easy with Ncat.
2. The addition of the Ndiff scan comparison tool completes Nmap's growth into a whole suite of applications which work together to serve network administrators and security practitioners. Ndiff makes it easy to automatically scan your network daily and report on any changes (systems coming up or going down or changes to the software services they are running). The other two tools now packaged with Nmap itself are Ncat and the much improved Zenmap GUI and results viewer.
3. Nmap performance has improved dramatically. We spent last summer scanning much of the Internet and merging that data with internal enterprise scan logs to determine the most commonly open ports. This allows Nmap to scan fewer ports by default while finding more open ports. We also added a fixed-rate scan engine so you can bypass Nmap's congestion control algorithms and scan at exactly the rate (packets per second) you specify.
4. We released Nmap Network Scanning, the official Nmap guide to network discovery and security scanning. From explaining port scanning basics for novices to detailing low-level packet crafting methods used by advanced hackers, this book suits all levels of security and networking professionals. A 42-page reference guide documents every Nmap feature and option, while the rest of the book demonstrates how to apply those features to quickly solve real-world tasks. More than half the book is available in the free online edition.
5. The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) is one of Nmap's most powerful and flexible features. It allows users to write (and share) simple scripts to automate a wide variety of networking tasks. Those scripts are then executed in parallel with the speed and efficiency you expect from Nmap. All existing scripts have been improved, and 32 new ones added. New scripts include a whole bunch of MSRPC/NetBIOS attacks, queries, and vulnerability probes; open proxy detection; whois and AS number lookup queries; brute force attack scripts against the SNMP and POP3 protocols; and many more. All NSE scripts and modules are described in the new NSE documentation portal.
Details are here: http://nmap.org/changelog.html
