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List:       nmap-dev
Subject:    New Ncat-Lua functionality - brainstorming
From:       Jacek Wielemborek <wielemborekj1 () gmail ! com>
Date:       2013-06-29 14:25:37
Message-ID: CAOfLAvgdJVJzK1QZtprDpTBprWgJQ9P5kECxqm-B561G12O5-A () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi guys,

First of all, thank you for testing the ncat-lua branch. I hadn't,
though, received too much feedback on the feature yet, so if you tried
it out but hadn't posted on the mailing list, please do so. Anyway, I
could definitely use your input on the next Lua feature I'm planning,
so please read on.

1) Situation so far

At the moment a user willing to use Lua with Ncat can use --lua-exec,
a feature allowing to talk to the socket using standard input /
standard output. That means that the user can run any Lua script using
the "io" built-in library and it will work with Ncat without any
modification. For some situations, though, this might not be enough.
--lua-exec cannot, for example, be used to write server scripts that
share state across connections or make their own ones in the process.
This is why we could use another Lua feature for a bit more demanding
situations.

2) Use cases / user stories

In order to come up with a new architecture/feature set for Ncat-Lua
project, we need more use cases. Imagine you could use Ncat for
scripting any network utilities you can dream of. What would you like
to do? Are there any jobs you can think of that could be performed
well by a Lua program aided by the Ncat functionality?

As an example of user stories that could be helpful, consider three
ones submitted by me here: https://secwiki.org/w/Ncat-Lua - namely,
"Simple chat server", "Minimalistic IRC client" and "httplookup". As
you can see, there's not much to be read and that's fine - the user
stories are meant to be short and just describe what you want to do.
Leave the implementation up to us ;)

3) Other ideas

We also welcome other ideas for the new Lua functionality. For
example, we haven't yet decided on how to invoke the scripts
(including some argument passing). Personally, I like the idea Daniel
Miller posted here: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2013/q2/461

Or perhaps you have some example code to illustrate the problem you'd
like to solve the new Ncat-Lua way? We could use feature requests at
the moment - just make sure you back it up with some explanation, most
preferably a user story so we could see how you'd use it.

So, think about it for a while! Your creativity is definitely what we
need right now.

Yours,
Jacek Wielemborek
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