Network Security Tools

Nikto Under the Hood

This section traces the logic flow of the entire Nikto program, and discusses the routines available through nikto_core and LibWhisker. The Nikto program structure is modular. Most of Nikto’s actual functionality lies within external plug-ins , which you can find in the plugins/ directory where the Nikto source code was uncompressed.

Tip

It is a good idea to browse the source of existing plug-ins to better understand how they work. Execute the following Linux command from the Nikto root directory to generate a tag file for the source tree:

find . -name "*.pl" -o -name "*.pm" -o -name "*.plugin" | xargs ctags 
--language-force=perl