Re: Nmap Attack Scripting Language (NASL)

[Diman Todorov <diman () xover mud at>]

Arun,

> Aren't you talking of something similar to a plugin based  
> architecture?
Yep, that's the idea.

> Why don't we invest in building the architecture in C itself? I mean
> projects like ethereal have done it successfully. Why should we add a
> language and take away the programmers freedom?
If an embedded language is added, most of the required structure for a
module API has to be constructed as well. It is a side product so to  
say.


> Or better still I think it should be a plugin architecture with  
> plugins
> possible in various languages. For the ambitious ones, they could  
> do it
> in C and for people with less time it could be some simple script like
> plugin.
This sounds good to me, I second it.

Further,

Another problem I see with Swig based extension is that at least as  
far as I
can see Swig doesn't provide thread safety (please correct me if you  
think
otherwise). Since performance is critical in Nmap it is nice to be  
able to execute
multiple instances of the script at the same time.

For an exhaustive reference of the Lua functionality please skim  
through the index
of the online Lua book http://www.lua.org/pil/
Note that unlike Swig based implementations you don't have to write  
glue code
in an interface syntax to use Lua's datatypes from c. While Swig cuts  
down on
development time for wrapping code, Lua takes it one step further and  
eliminates
the whole 'yet another meta language' mumbo jumbo.

There is nevertheless one last reason for which I wouldn't go for  
Swig. Last time
I used Swig (with Ruby) the only method to call Ruby code was through  
c callbacks.
At least to my knowledge TCL has the same constraint ( http:// 
wiki.tcl.tk/1819 )
What we need is a language to extend Nmap. Extending a language
with an Nmap API is another project entirely (see Fyodors pointers to  
CRAN).
Without a way to execute scripts from the c side (except by asking  
the underlying
system to do so) I don't see an elegant way to embed a language into  
Nmap.

cheers
Diman




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