4.1. Installing Nikto

Nikto is available on its author's web site at http://www.cirt.net. Download the latest tar.gz file of the Nikto source code. After uncompressing it, execute perl nikto.pl from the command line to see the program's options. This chapter was written using Nikto 1.32 as a reference, but future versions should be very similar, as the core is stable.

To use Nikto you must have a Perl interpreter on your system. If you want to use Nikto's SSL scanning features you must install the SSL software and libraries. You can get these for Windows systems from http://www.activestate.com/. If you're running Nikto on a Unix-like system, you can get OpenSSL from http://www.openssl.org/ and the Net::SSLeay module from http://www.cpan.org/. At its foundation Nikto uses RFP's LibWhisker, which comes bundled with the tar.gz file; optionally you can place Nikto in the Perl library search path.

Nikto runs on a variety of operating systems, including Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux, Windows, and many others, as long as a Perl interpreter is installed on the system.