Re: Specifying dissectors declaratively

[Alexander Adolf <alexander.adolf () condition-alpha com>]

On 2017-04-19, at 14:16 , Pascal Quantin <pascal.quantin () gmail com> wrote:

> [...]
> It's true that it is used a lot for telephony business. ASN stands for Abstract Syntax Notation and defines a grammar 
> that is independent of the encoding used. Then you have all the encoding variants: (aligned or not) PER, BER, DER, 
> XER, GSER, OER, etc... It could be used for any protocol, but it's encoding is complex and not as friendly as a basic 
> TLV one for humans like us :)
>
> asn2wrs is really specialized for (un)aligned PER and BER, so not relevant to any other protocol (and should not be 
> extended to something else other than ASN.1 variants).

I have used ASN.1 in projects, and I would fully support Pascal's recommendation that it doesn't seem the best choice 
for Wireshark.

> > Kaitai seems very interesting to just have a short look at. But the question is still, not really which language to 
> > use, but what should the integration be like.
> > [...]

https://github.com/dloss/binary-parsing

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/binpacIMC06.pdf

http://nmedit.sourceforge.net/subprojects/libpdl.html

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~dbrumley/pdf/Borisov%20et%20al._2007_A%20Generic%20Application-Level%20Protocol%20Analyzer%20and%20its%20Language.pdf

Disclaimer: I haven't used any of these, nor have I investigated what build infrastructure they would require.

Many of these offer just-in-time compilers for their description language. So this would probably mean inventing some 
kind of plugin system for such dynamically loaded, and JIT-compiled parsing scripts.

Cheers,

  --alexander
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