Today I saw a blog post about a wireshark alternative called
networtnightvision that claims to be more secure than wireshark. I'm
very interested in this because wireshark is just too dangerous to run,
IMO. Anyways, the sniffer is written in dylan. I have never heard of
dylan before. Here is a snippet from a paper [0] which the author claims:
~~~~snip from the paper~~~~
Since we noticed a lack of a decent secure framework for handling
network packets, we have designed and implemented major parts of a
TCP/IP stack in the high level programming language Dylan, focusing on
security, performance and code reuse.
Dylan is a high level language that provides a number of features to
detect and prevent data reference failures, one of the most common
sources of vulnerabilities in C software.
Bounds checks for array accesses are inserted where needed by the
compiler. Also a garbage collector is used, avoiding the need to care
about manual memory management, and preventing bugs from early frees or
double frees. Dylan is strongly typed, so bypassing the type system by
doing casts and pointer arithmetic is not possible.
~~~~snip from the paper~~~~
Is this for real? I figured if anyone could shed some light on this, an
OpenBSD developer might be able to comment on this "dylan" language. I'm
not looking to learn dylan, but am just wondering if this is legit. I
wouldn't mind running one of these tools if they are indeed "safer" to
run than wireshark. (yes i use tcpdump regularly)
[0] http://www.opendylan.org/~hannes/secure-networking.pdf
