[HN Gopher] YARA is dead, long live YARA-X
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       YARA is dead, long live YARA-X
        
       Author : serhack_
       Score  : 120 points
       Date   : 2024-05-18 10:06 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (virustotal.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (virustotal.github.io)
        
       | rwmj wrote:
       | Yara seems to be quite widely used by the UK police for digital
       | forensics (or at least by the companies that supply their tools).
        
         | lima wrote:
         | Yara is pretty much the industry standard for detection rules
         | now.
        
       | badrabbit wrote:
       | If all you have is a Rusty hammer, everything is a nail.
       | 
       | Third party module dev is harder now for yara-x. And I wonder how
       | the python module will turn out.
       | 
       | Neither 3rd party/go clients nor the official virustotal C client
       | could meet my requirements, I had to write a scanner in python on
       | at least two different times and having to do it again soon. The
       | main issues are resource usage, result shuffling and supporting
       | very large proprietary ruled that depend on specific yara
       | modules.
       | 
       | Crowsresponse by crowdstrike is better too but it still has
       | limits. Python is the best way to yara.
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | > Third party module dev is harder now for yara-x.
         | 
         | In what way / what's harder about it?
        
       | serhack_ wrote:
       | TL;DR: https://github.com/VirusTotal/yara-x
        
         | Ar-Curunir wrote:
         | It's a pretty short article. You really have to hate reading to
         | not be able get through it...
        
           | serhack_ wrote:
           | Apart from the website itself, there're no links of YARA-X
           | repo in that article
        
       | lima wrote:
       | The risk with such rewrites is ending up with a Python 3
       | situation and an ecosystem split. Sounds like YARA-X is (mostly)
       | a stricter subset of YARA, and it's easy to write rules that are
       | valid for both:
       | 
       | https://virustotal.github.io/yara-x/docs/writing_rules/diffe...
       | 
       | Although I wonder how long it'll stay that way? It'll be very
       | tempting to add new features to YARA-X that won't be backported
       | to YARA.
        
         | andrewflnr wrote:
         | > At VirusTotal, we have been running YARA-X alongside YARA for
         | a while, scanning millions of files with tens of thousands of
         | rules, and addressing discrepancies between the two.
         | 
         | This is pretty encouraging as far as compatibility. I hope they
         | keep doing this.
        
       | kingforaday wrote:
       | After reading the article, a fun thought popped into my head. Who
       | has the right to determine if a project like this is dead or
       | EOL'd? Is it the original author to make that declaration or when
       | it is under BSD license, wide community-use, and support -- when
       | does a project like this truly become dead or EOL'd?
        
         | dartos wrote:
         | Well EOL usually means something like "end of official support,
         | active development, and security patches" so the
         | owner/creator/foundation usually chooses when.
         | 
         | "Dead" is usually a colloquialism, so if enough people call it
         | dead, it is.
        
           | zokier wrote:
           | The corollary is that if you didn't have any support to begin
           | with, as is the case with most open source projects, EOL is
           | pretty meaningless concept.
        
         | anamexis wrote:
         | Whoever owns the canonical repo (also, any relevant trademarks)
         | has a lot of power in this situation. The community can
         | certainly fork it, but then you start asking if the fork is a
         | new project.
        
         | patmorgan23 wrote:
         | The official maintainers say they won't be maintaining the repo
         | any more. Anyone else is always welcome to fork and form their
         | own project to continue to maintain the software.
        
       | petiepooo wrote:
       | YARA-X is dead, long love the next fad
        
       | skybrian wrote:
       | For curious onlookers, here's an explanation of what Yara does:
       | 
       | https://virustotal.github.io/yara/
        
       | banish-m4 wrote:
       | YARA is on every Mac and about half of corporate laptops.
        
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       (page generated 2024-05-19 23:01 UTC)