NAME
nasl - Nessus Attack Scripting Language parser
SYNOPSIS
nasl
<[-vh] [-DLp] [-T tracefile] [-s] [-t target] [-sX] > files...
DESCRIPTION
R nasl
executes a set of NASL scripts against a given target host. It can
also be used to determine if a NASL script has any syntax errors by running
it in parse (-p) or lint (-L) mode.
OPTIONS
-T tracefile
Makes nasl write verbosely what the script does in the file
tracefile
, ala 'set -x' under sh
-t target
Apply the NASL script to
target
which may be a single host (127.0.0.1), a whole subnet (192.168.1.0/24)
or several subnets (192.168.1.0/24, 192.168.243.0/24). The default target
is localhost (127.0.0.1).
-s
Sets the return value of safe_checks() to 1. (See the nessusd manual to know
what the safe checks are)
-D
Only run the description part of the script.
-p
Only parse the script, do not execute it.
-L
I Lint
the script (run extended checks).
-X
Run the script in
I authenticated
mode. For more information see the NASL reference manual.
-v
Show the version of NASL.
SEE ALSO
R The NASL2 reference manual,
R The Nessus Attack Scripting Language Reference Guide,
R http://www.nessus.org/documentation/,
M
nessus(1),
nessusd(8).
The NASL reference and manual (written by Renaud Deraison and Michel Arboi
respectively) are available in the NASL sources. An online copy of the NASL2
reference manual can be found at
R http://michel.arboi.free.fr/nasl2ref/, a printable version is available at
R http://www.nessus.org/nasl2ref.pdf.
HISTORY
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 network-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 lazyness made us wait for early 2003 to have it working completely.
AUTHOR
Most of the engine is (C) 2003 Michel Arboi, most of the built-in functions
are (C) 2003 Renaud Deraison