Nessus Network Auditing
Learn about this open-source vulnerability scanner, how to get the most out of the tool, recognize its limitations and how to deal with them, and what makes it flexible to perform a wide range of network-based operations.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Nessus Network Auditing
Appendix A: The NASL2 Reference Manual
Michel Arboi
2004-08-25
Abstract
This is the NASL2 reference manual ($Revision: 1.48 $). It describes the language syntax and the internal functions.
If you want tips on how to write a security test in NASL, read The Nessus Attack Scripting Language Reference Guide by Renaud Deraison
1 Introduction
1.1 History
Please read The Nessus Attack Scripting Language Reference Guide.
Here is what the man page says:
NASL comes from a private project called pkt_forge , which was written in late 1998 by Renaud Deraison and which was an interactive shell to forge and send raw IP packets (this pre-dates Perl s Net::RawIP by a couple of weeks). It was then extended to do a wide range of net work-related operations and integrated into Nessus as NASL .
The parser was completely hand-written and a pain to work with. In Mid-2002, Michel Arboi wrote a bison parser for NASL, and he and Renaud Deraison re-wrote NASL from scratch. Although the new NASL was nearly working as early as August 2002, Michel s laziness made us wait for early 2003 to have it working completely.
1.2 Differences between NASL1 and NASL2
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NASL2 uses a real Bison parser. It is stricter and can handle complex expressions.
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NASL2 has more built-in functions (although most of them could be back ported to NASL1).
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NASL2 has more built-in operators.
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NASL2 is much quicker (about sixteen times).
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Most NASL2 scripts cannot run under NASL1.
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And a few NASL1 scripts cannot run under NASL2 (but fixing...
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