Re: Nmap Attack Scripting Language (NASL)

["Paul Rigor" <prigor () uci edu>]

Hi Dave,
Yes, wrapping using swig (or even sip) would cut development time.
Scripting languages can just write appropriate interfaces to wrapped NMAP
functionality which would then be used by whatever grammar NASL develops.
This sounds like fun!
Paul

On 5/22/06, David Warde-Farley <david.warde.farley () utoronto ca> wrote:
> 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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