dylan language
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
Re: dylan language
On Fri, Dec 22, 2006 at 11:42:44AM -0800, Joe wrote: 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) I have the beginning of a port of gwydiondylan, there are still a lot of issues to fix. The byte-code compiler (mindy) is slow as hell, d2c doesn't quite work for me yet. Outside of that, dylan-binary does not work on a range of architectures. Dylan reminds me of haskell. Both are high-level languages, better than sliced bread, and *everything* you want to build with them involves compilation speeds that make g++ look like it's the fastest thing out there...
Re: dylan language
On 12/22/06, Joe [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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] 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) The CCC also had some features on the use of Dylan and its role in the design of a new network analysis framework. Some other things they mention in relation are the implementation of a userland TCP/iP stack and the challenge to keep performance reasonable (a noble goal considering the rising link speeds we need to analyze). At that time networknightvision is referred to as PoC only. It's reported to have a fraction of the features of Ethereal and Dylan's resulting compiled code is reported to be a little slower than Perl. To me it sounds like something that is in a bit of an infancy. DS
Re: dylan language
On Fri, Dec 22, 2006 at 11:42:44AM -0800, Joe wrote: 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: Isn't Dylan the one that Apple were talking about around the same time that Sun released Java?
