how to submit targets via the nessus API? - nessus

Question

I am trying to create a new scan in Nessus (6.4) via the API following the documentation. I have a policy set up and the code to create the scan is
import requests
headers = {
"X-ApiKeys": "accessKey = 8cc43676fe7e9046353fcd36c41c61f4f78f7a8df646653fbde4641e352d36d9; secretKey = ab7eeafbe3f9f544b10496ff63297f8f55692cc5f4dca3f3d74e0917b6ec2ed0;"
}
data = {
"uuid": "ab4bacd2-05f6-425c-9d79-3ba3940ad1c24e51e1f403febe40",
"settings": {
"name": "myscan1",
"policy_id": "4",
"enabled": "false",
"text_targets": "192.168.1.1"
}
}
r = requests.post('https://localhost:8834/scans', data=data, verify=False, headers=headers)
print(r.status_code, r.text)
This outputs
(400, u'{"error":"Invalid \'targets\' field"}')
The documentation explicitly gives an example for the POST body:
Below is a sample body for this request:
{
"uuid": {template_uuid},
"settings": {
"name": {string},
"description": {string},
"emails": {string},
"enabled": "true",
"launch": {string},
"folder_id": {integer},
"policy_id": {integer},
"scanner_id": {integer},
"text_targets": {string},
"use_dashboard": {boolean}
}
}
I checked an actual scan creation in the interface, analyzing the HTTPS traffic. The POST body starts with
{
"uuid":"ad629e16-03b6-8c1d-cef6-ef8c9dd3c658d24bd260ef5f9e66",
"settings":{
"name":"test1",
"description":"",
"folder_id":"3",
"scanner_id":"1",
"text_targets":"192.168.1.1",
"file_targets":"",
(...)
so it looks like the targets are provided correctly.
Any idea what else to check regarding the targets field??

Answer 1

I forgot to json.dumps() the POST payload (and possibly add a content-type to the header).
The example below works (this time the authentication is done via a token from /session, but the same works with the authorization keys in the question)
headers = {
"X-Cookie": "token={token};".format(token=token),
"content-type": "application/json"
}
data = {
"uuid": "ab4bacd2-05f6-425c-9d79-3ba3940ad1c24e51e1f403febe40",
"settings": {
"name": "myscan1",
"policy_id": "4",
"enabled": "false",
"text_targets": "192.168.1.1",
}
}
r = requests.post('https://localhost:8834/scans', data=json.dumps(data), verify=False, headers=headers)