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Automatically complementing protocol specifications from network traces

Published: 11 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Network servers can be tested for correctness by resorting to a specification of the implemented protocol. However, producing a protocol specification can be a time consuming task. In addition, protocols are constantly evolving with new functionality and message formats that render the previously defined specifications incomplete or deprecated. This paper presents a methodology to automatically complement an existing specification with extensions to the protocol by analyzing the contents of the messages in network traces. The approach can be used on top of existing protocol reverse engineering techniques allowing it to be applied to both open and closed protocols. This approach also has the advantage of capturing unpublished or undocumented features automatically, thus obtaining a more complete and realistic specification of the implemented protocol. The proposed solution was evaluated with a prototype tool that was able to complement an IETF protocol (FTP) specification with several extensions extracted from traffic data collected in 320 public servers.

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  • (2024)DSFuzz: deep state of stateful protocol fuzzing2024 5th International Conference on Computer Engineering and Application (ICCEA)10.1109/ICCEA62105.2024.10603807(213-220)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2024
  • (2022)StateAFL: Greybox fuzzing for stateful network serversEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-022-10233-327:7Online publication date: 4-Oct-2022
  • (2021)A Review on the Service Virtualisation and Its Structural PillarsApplied Sciences10.3390/app1105238111:5(2381)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2021
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cover image ACM Other conferences
EWDC '11: Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Dependable Computing
May 2011
106 pages
ISBN:9781450302845
DOI:10.1145/1978582
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 11 May 2011

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)DSFuzz: deep state of stateful protocol fuzzing2024 5th International Conference on Computer Engineering and Application (ICCEA)10.1109/ICCEA62105.2024.10603807(213-220)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2024
  • (2022)StateAFL: Greybox fuzzing for stateful network serversEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-022-10233-327:7Online publication date: 4-Oct-2022
  • (2021)A Review on the Service Virtualisation and Its Structural PillarsApplied Sciences10.3390/app1105238111:5(2381)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2021
  • (2017)Using Segment-Based Alignment to Extract Packet Structures from Network Traces2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS.2017.49(398-409)Online publication date: Jul-2017
  • (2016)Enabling Automatic Protocol Behavior Analysis for Android ApplicationsProceedings of the 12th International on Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/2999572.2999596(281-295)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2016
  • (2016)Model-based Security TestingProceedings of the 11th ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/2897845.2897874(651-662)Online publication date: 30-May-2016

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