Re: Nmap Attack Scripting Language (NASL)

[David Warde-Farley <david.warde.farley () utoronto ca>]

On 23-May-06, at 2:36 AM, Paul Rigor wrote:

> I say python.  You can even wrap nmap and use it a module.  Have  
> python
> handle the application logic and scripting language parser adn have it
> invoke appropriate NMAP functionality.  Python has great string  
> processing
> facilities as well as an XML parser.  It's also *very* portable,  
> true OOP,
> good unit test, debugging might prove cumbersome though.  Oh, also  
> you can
> freeze python scripts/programs and have them run as executables  
> (which of
> course rely on  shared python libraries and an nmap shared lib, is  
> there
> already such a thing).  If you've ever used python, you will also  
> definitely
> cut development.

Any of python, ruby, perl seem suited to the job. Hell, I think  
Scheme is really suited to the job but Fyodor does not ;) One thing  
to note: the way I read the doc it seems that we're looking at a  
scripting engine to be included in Nmap.  This can be done with  
python, embedding an interpreter is pretty easy and there are good  
docs on it. However, one thing that makes me weary of python is that  
they aren't backwards compatible from version to version. Thus you'd  
probably have to "freeze" the python version you're using and piss  
off some people one way or the other depending on the degree you keep  
up with the current python release.

However I think you've stumbled upon an interesting point, Paul. Why  
embed a scripting language in Nmap when you can embed Nmap in  
(possibly several) scripting languages?

What I'm saying is, why not have the SoC'ers, maybe 2 or more of  
them, implement Python/Ruby/etc. bindings for the underlying  
libraries, or a C abstraction layer on top of them, with SWIG etc.  
the way Subversion does it? Then people can choose the scripting  
language they want to work with from a set of them that have bindings.

Dave


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