SAINT Design

| # Design Goals The design goal of SAINT was not to solve any one single security problem. Instead, SAINT was designed to: Use the traditional Unix toolbox approach of program design. Design a security package that was educational as well as useful. Discover and uncover as much security and network information as possible without being destructive. Create the best investigative security network tool available, at any price. ### Toolkit approach As mentioned earlier, heavy emphasis was placed on the traditional UNIX toolkit approach to program designing. As with many programs of this size and scope, SAINT is modular, made up of many smaller programs. ### Speed/optimization Optimizing SAINT 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 SAINT 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 to make performance a non-issue for most network queries and work. However, with the introduction of firewalls into the equation, the issue of speed becomes even less important. In order to do a thorough job, sufficient time must be allowed to detect all targets in a firewalled environment and to run the necessary probes against them. Back to the Introductory TOC/Index