FAQ

Do I need to install Spicy and/or a Zeek plugin to use Spicy parsers in Zeek?

If you’re using Zeek >= 5.0 with a default build configuration, there’s nothing else you need to install. After installing Zeek, the same folder containing the zeek binary will also have the relevant Spicy tools, such as spicyc (provided by Spicy) and spicyz (provided by Zeek). To double check that the Spicy support is indeed available, look for Zeek::Spicy in the output of zeek -N:

# zeek -N
<...>
Zeek::Spicy - Support for Spicy parsers (``*.spicy``, ``*.evt``, ``*.hlto``) (built-in)

Note that it remains possible to build Zeek against an external Spicy installation, or even without any Spicy support at all. Look at Zeek’s configure for corresponding options.

Note

For some historic background: Zeek 5.0 started bundling Spicy, as well as the former Zeek plugin for Spicy, so that now nothing else needs to be installed separately anymore to use Spicy parsers. Since Zeek 6.0, the code for that former plugin has further moved into Zeek itself, and is now maintained directly by the Zeek developers.

Does Spicy support Dynamic Protocol Detection (DPD)?

Yes, see the corresponding section on how to add it to your analyzers.

Can I write a Layer 2 protocol analyzer with Spicy?

Yes, you can. In Zeek terminology a layer 2 protocol analyzer is a packet analyzer, see the corresponding section on how to declare such an analyzer.

I have print statements in my Spicy grammar, why do I not see any output when running Zeek?

Zeek by default disables the output of Spicy-side print statements. To enable them, add Spicy::enable_print=T to the Zeek command line (or redef Spicy::enable_print=T; to a Zeek script that you are loading).

My analyzer recognizes only one or two TCP packets even though there are more in the input.

In Zeek, a Spicy analyzer parses the sending and receiving sides of a TCP connection each according to the given Spicy grammar. This means that if more than one message can be sent per side the grammar needs to allow for that. For example, if the grammar parses messages of the protocol as Message, the top-level parsing unit given in the EVT file needs to be able to parse a list of messages Message[].

One way to express this is to introduce a parser which wraps messages of the protocol in an anonymous field.

Warning

Since in general the number of messages exchanged over a TCP connection is unbounded, an anonymous field should be used. If a named field was used instead the parser would need to store all messages over the connection which would lead to unbounded memory growth.

type Message = unit {
  # Fields for messages of the protocol.
};

# Parser used e.g., in EVT file.
public type Messages = unit {
  : Message[];
};