Automated protocol analysis

posted Jan 13th 2009 7:24pm by Eliot
filed under: downloads hacks, security hacks

wireshark

[I)ruid] from BreakingPoint Labs has been doing quite a bit of protocol reverse engineering as part of his work. He put together a post covering some of the tools that have been useful for this task. Text-based protocols have a lot of human readable characters that can help you identify fields. Binary protocols don’t have this luxury though. He recommends the Protocol Informatics Project for tackling these situations. It applies bioinformatics algorithms to network traffic. You give it a packet dump of the protocol and it compares them to find similarities the same way genetic sequences are compared. It can be confused by protocols that waste a lot of space, but it’s still a very clever approach to reversing.

[photo: slashcrisis]

Comments [4]

tagged: bioinformatics, breakingpoint labs, druid, druidian, fuzzing, protocol, protocol informatics

4 Responses to Automated protocol analysis

Gert says:

January 13, 2009 at 11:41 pm

News: the project was published as a proto in 2004, and was abandoned since.

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furniture says:

October 16, 2009 at 11:34 pm

Good post and nice design, is this a regular template?.

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crashtesting says:

March 17, 2010 at 2:26 pm

Something similar, but much more active is here:

https://www.ee.oulu.fi/research/ouspg/genome

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JoshWeaver says:

January 4, 2011 at 11:57 am

JIC someone is reversing a binary network proto and comes across this and runs into multiple problems with the ppc .so included, here is the fix, as of today:
1.) backup or toss the align.so file in the PI subfolder
2.) aptitude install python-pyrex python-numeric python-pydot
3.) If on linux, edit the make file and change the -J argument to xargs to -I
4.) pyrexc align.pyx (this will create align.c)
5.) make (this will create the .so)
6.) ./main.py

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