Lua is language used in a number of games such as SimCity and WoW, but it is also gaining popularity in the security community. It is now used in the Nmap Scripting Engine (http://nmap.org/book/nse-language.html) and Wireshark (http://wiki.wireshark.org/Lua).

Here are some details from the Lua site directly:

Quote

What's in a name?
"Lua" (pronounced LOO-ah) means "Moon" in Portuguese. As such, it is neither an acronym nor an abbreviation, but a noun. More specifically, "Lua" is a name, the name of the Earth's moon and the name of the language. Like most names, it should be written in lower case with an initial capital, that is, "Lua". Please do not write it as "LUA", which is both ugly and confusing, because then it becomes an acronym with different meanings for different people. So, please, write "Lua" right!

What is Lua?
Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language.
Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

http://www.lua.org

Anyone with experience and/or thoughts to share on Lua?

Don

I've only ever used it for nmap scripting but I did not find it too difficult to grasp. I had posted on using it to modify an existing script a while back on the LSO website.

http://www.learnsecurityonline.com/index.php?option=com_mamboboard&Itemid=&func=view&catid=61&id=2255#2255

dean

EH-Net

Ethical Hacking Discussions and Related Certifications => Programming => Topic started by: don on June 06, 2008, 03:31:59 PM