rure-go VS hyperscan

rure-go (regex 1.9.3) - uses the Rust regex engine with CGo bindings. The downside is a Rust library dependency that needs to be compiled;

Totally agreed: almost all users (me/GoAWK included) want performance and don't care nearly as much about simplicity under the hood. Simplicity of implementation is of value for educational purposes, but we could easily have a small, simple 3rd party package for that. Go's regexp package is kinda too complex for a simple educational demonstration and too simple to be fast. :-)

I actually tried BurntSushi's https://github.com/BurntSushi/rure-go (bindings to Rust's regex engine) with GoAWK and it made regex handling 4-5x as fast for many regexes, despite the CGo overhead. However, rure-go (and CGo in general) is a bit painful to build, so I'm not going to use that. Maybe I'll create a branch for speed freaks who want it.

I've also thought of using https://gitlab.com/cznic/ccgo to convert Mawk's fast regex engine to Go source and see how that performs. Maybe on the next rainy day...

Maybe some other PCRE-compatible implementation offers streaming. For instance, https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... says it has this feature, but of course given who it's from it may be tied to a single brand of CPU.

github seems to be https://github.com/intel/hyperscan

I think of WAFs as an extra safety net. Defense in depth.

The author complained about the performance cost of WAFs in general, but not all WAFs have be structured like ModSecurity. They could for example be based on something like https://github.com/intel/hyperscan and perf is at a very different level.

Another example of old timey Unix code just breaking things in minor point releases. See https://abi-laboratory.pro/index.php?view=changelog&l=glibc&... and https://github.com/intel/hyperscan/issues/359.

It’s a bespoke scanning setup designed to deal with GitHub’s scale. Under the hood it’s using Intel’s hyperscan as the regex engine.

https://github.com/intel/hyperscan

Hyperscan is an Intel regular expression library.

We are using hyperscan [3] instead of grepping byte sequences with Python, which is orders of magnitudes faster. It can also handle 4Gb+ files because of this which binwalk cannot.

It's used for a year now in production and it's way more precise and faster than binwalk. We are getting less false-positives too, and even if unblob fails to extract everything, we still get meaningful information out of firmwares, where binwalk just failed with no output previously.

[1]: https://github.com/onekey-sec/unblob/blob/main/unblob/handle...

[2]: https://github.com/onekey-sec/unblob/blob/main/unblob/proces...

[3]: https://github.com/intel/hyperscan