NAME

       openvas-nasl - NASL Attack Scripting Language

SYNOPSIS

       openvas-nasl <[-Vh] [-T tracefile] [-s] [-t target] [-c config_file] [-d] [-sX] > files...

DESCRIPTION

       openvas-nasl executes a set of NASL scripts against a given target host. It can also be used to determine
       if a NASL script has any syntax errors by running it in parse (-p) or lint (-L) mode.

OPTIONS

       -T tracefile
              Makes nasl write verbosely what the script does in the file tracefile , ala 'set -x' under sh

       -t target
              Apply  the  NASL  script  to  target  which  may  be  a  single  host  (127.0.0.1), a whole subnet
              (192.168.1.0/24) or several subnets (192.168.1.0/24, 192.168.243.0/24)

       -e iface
              Specifies the network interface to be used as the source for established connections.

       -s     Sets the return value of safe_checks() to 1. (See the OpenVAS Scanner documentation to  know  what
              the safe checks are) Implies -B.

       -D     Only run the description part of the script.

       -B     Runs in description mode before running the script.

       -L     Lint the script  (run extended checks).

       -X     Run the script with disabled signature verification.

       -h     Show help

       -V     Show the version of NASL.

       -d     Output debug information to stderr.

       -r port-range
              This  is the default range of ports that the scanner plugins will probe. The syntax of this option
              is flexible, it can be a single range ("1-1500"), several ports ("21,23,80"),  several  ranges  of
              ports  ("1-1500,32000-33000"). Note that you can specify UDP and TCP ports by prefixing each range
              by T or U. For instance, the following range will make openvas scan UDP ports 1 to  1024  and  TCP
              ports 1 to 65535 : "T:1-65535,U:1-1024".

       -k key=value
              Set KB key to value. Can be used multiple times.

SEE ALSO

       openvas(8), openvas-nasl-lint(1)

HISTORY

       NASL  comes  from a private project called 'pkt_forge', which was written in late 1998 by Renaud Deraison
       and which was an interactive shell to forge and send raw IP packets (this pre-dates Perl's Net::RawIP  by
       a  couple of weeks). It was then extended to do a wide range of network-related operations and integrated
       into the scanner as 'NASL'.

       The parser was completely hand-written and a pain to work with. In Mid-2002, Michel Arboi wrote  a  bison
       parser  for  NASL,  and  he  and  Renaud Deraison re-wrote NASL from scratch. Although the "new" NASL was
       nearly working as early as August 2002, Michel's laziness made us wait for early 2003 to have it  working
       completely.

       After  the  original  authors  decided  to  stop  the  Open  Source development in 2005, most changes and
       maintenance works were done by Greenbone Networks.

AUTHOR

       Most of the engine is (C) 2003 Michel Arboi, most of the built-in functions are (C) 2003 Renaud Deraison.
       Most new code since 2005 developed by Greenbone Networks GmbH.

Greenbone Vulnerability Management                February 2021                                          NASL(1)