Nessus 8.3.0 Release Notes - 2019-03-26

This release is end-of-life (EOL). Upgrade to a supported version. For information about EOL dates and policies for Tenable products, see the Tenable Software Release Lifecycle Matrix and Policy.

Note: For Nessus 8.3.0 scanners installed on Windows, set the new setting Max Plugin Output Size to 100000 to ensure that scan exports function correctly. You can configure this setting in the Scanning section of Advanced Settings. For more information, see the Knowledge Article Nessus Scanner on version 8.3.0 restarts upon scan completion. This was fixed in version 8.3.1.

New Features

The following are the new features included in the Nessus 8.3.0 Release:

  • Flexibility for Reporting in Nessus Professional - Often there can be too much data; now Nessus enables you to select precisely which information is included when exporting PDF and HTML reports. As an example, a user can choose when exporting to only include the host information, vulnerability information, and vulnerability score when creating a report. The user can also select to save the export options as default for any subsequent exports.
  • Performance updates for Agent deployments using Nessus Manager - Tenable made improvements to the processing time for scan results on Nessus Manager. The update includes disabling the inclusion of Audit Trail and KB data by default. As a best practice, it is recommended leaving these disabled for production environments. For testing/troubleshooting, both abilities can be re-activated for smaller agent groups if needed.

    • Additionally, new options to optimize agent data merge performance can be configured if desired and can provide additional speed-up. See the Agent Advanced Settings documentation for details on configuring these optimizations.

  • Scan Template Updates - Similar to plugin updates, scan templates can be updated at various times. With this release, new policies and policy updates are now delivered automatically.

  • Additional improvements include -

    • Added the ability to update the Offline registration license in the Nessus UI for scanners registered offline.

    • Add a new Advanced Setting plugin_output_max_size_kb, defaulted to 1MB, to configure the maximum per-plugin output size for XML elements in .nessus reports.

    • Added various NASL improvements and bug fixes

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue with filtering Scan Results on a date field that was causing missing results, due to a bad regular expression match.

  • Fixed an issue with importing Agent results by updating XML report processing to remove all invalid characters from XML.

  • Fixed an issue where incorrect date format of yy-mm-dd instead of YYYY-mm-dd was appearing in some places in the UI.

  • Fixed an issue with ARP Discovery.

  • Fixed an issue with importing Advanced Agent scans that was causing all plugins to be enabled in the imported scan.

  • Fixed an issue where customer hostnames containing invalid XML characters were breaking scan exports.

  • Fixed an issue with CSV Report Line Terminations, change cause reports doubling in size.

  • Fixed an issue with Plugin dependency processing that was causing empty results when running offline configuration audits from a Nessus scanner installed on a Tenable Appliance.

  • Fixed an issue with exporting Scan Diffs.

  • Fixed an issue where color-coded severity bullets were not displayed for Nessus PDF reports.

  • Fixed an issue with importing very large scan results into Tenable.sc.

  • Fixed an issue that was causing extraneous error messages in the nessusd.dump log file.

  • Updated openSSL patch level 1.0.2r to ensure latest security fixes are available. For more information, see the security advisory.

Upgrade Notes

Any previous version of Tenable Nessus can upgrade directly to Tenable Nessus 8.3.0.

Note: If your upgrade path skips versions of Nessus, Tenable recommends reviewing the release notes for all skipped versions to learn about new features and bug fixes.
  • Upgrading to Nessus 8.3.0 will trigger a rebuild of your plugin database. This may take several minutes to complete.
  • After you upgrade Nessus, downgrading to a prior version of Nessus is not supported. Please back up your system first.