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The Bro language

 

As discussed above, we express security policies in terms of scripts written in the specialized Bro language. In this section we give an overview of the language's features. The aim is to convey the flavor of the language, rather than describe it precisely.

Our goal of ``avoid simple mistakes'' (§ 1), while perhaps sounding trite, in fact heavily influenced the design of the Bro language. Because intrusion detection can form a cornerstone of the security measures available to a site, we very much want our policy scripts to behave as expected. From our own experience, a big step towards avoiding surprises is to use a strongly typed language that detects typing inconsistencies at compile-time, and that guarantees that all variable references at run-time will be to valid values. Furthermore, we have come to appreciate the benefits of domain-specific languages, that is, languages tailored for a particular task. Having cobbled together our first monitoring system out of tcpdump, awk, and shell scripts, we thirsted for ways to deal directly with hostnames, IP addresses, port numbers, and the like, rather than devising ASCII pseudo-equivalents. By making these sorts of entities first-class values in Bro, we both increase the ease of expression offered by the language and, due to strong typing, catch errors (such as comparing a port to an IP address) that might otherwise slip by.



next up previous
Next: Data types and constants Up: Index Previous: Policy script interpreter

Vern Paxson
Sat Dec 6 01:53:24 PST 1997