Inferring Protocol State Machine from Real-World Trace

Abstract

Application-level protocol specifications are helpful for network security management, including intrusion detection, intrusion prevention and detecting malicious code. However, current methods for obtaining unknown protocol specifications highly rely on manual operations, such as reverse engineering. This poster provides a novel insight into inferring a protocol state machine from real-world trace of a application. The chief feature of our method is that it has no priori knowledge of protocol format, and our technique is based on the statistical nature of the protocol specifications. We evaluate our approach with text and binary protocols, our experimental results demonstrate our proposed method has a good performance in practice.