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Pflang extensions

Pflua implements "pflang", the language that libpcap uses to express packet filters. Pflua also optionally provides some experimental extensions to pflang. These extensions are experimental, and naturally are not supported by the libpcap pipeline. Please let us know if you find them to be useful to you.

The address-of operator: &

By default, this operator is enabled. To disable, include this code somewhere in your app before parsing:

require('pf.parse').allow_address_of = false

An AddressExpression is a new kind of arithmetic expression. The grammar is as follows:

AddressExpression := '&' Addressable
Addressable := PayloadAccessor '[' ArithmeticExpression [ ':' (1|2|4) ] ']'
PayloadAccessor := 'ip' | 'ip6' | 'tcp' | 'udp' | 'icmp' |
   'arp' | 'rarp' | 'wlan' | 'ether' | 'fddi' | 'tr' | 'ppp' |
   'slip' | 'link' | 'radio' | 'ip' | 'ip6' | 'tcp' | 'udp' |
   'igmp' | 'pim' | 'igrp' | 'vrrp' | 'sctp'

The semantics are that &foo returns the address of foo, as a byte offset from the beginning of the packet. Therefore if a packet is TCP and the first byte of the packet is the first byte of the ethernet header, then ether[&tcp[0]] = tcp[0] will always be true.

If the packet is not of the correct kind, then the comparison in which the AddressExpression is embedded fails to match. This would be the case, for example, if you asked for &udp[0] but the packet isn't UDP.

Likewise, if the address isn't within the packet, the containing comparison will fail to match. An example would be &udp[64] on a UDP packet whose size, including the UDP header but excluding the IP or other L2 header is less than 64 bytes. Note that this behavior differs from udp[64] on a short packet; such an access causes the whole filter to abort (see the pflang documentation).

The pfmatch language

See the pfmatch page, for more.