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Genome Methods Applied to Reverse-Engineering
L1TH10N writes "Wired news has an article on a truely innovative way of analysing network protocol reverse-engineering. Marshall Beddoe, a security analyst, is using algorithms used in bioinformatics to analyse closed-source and secret network protocols which he calls "Protocol Informatics".According to Beddoe, network conversations are full of "junk" -- usually the actual data being sent -- which interferes with the analysis of the occasional command sequence that controls what to do with that junk. This has parrallels with Bioinformatics that has to deal with a similar problem of finding known DNA sequences separated by long gaps of unknown data. Biologists have devised complex algorithms to discover whether DNA sequences are descended from the same ancestors by comparing the genetic differences with the known mutation rates of certain DNA components. Beddoe applied the same principles to mutating network conversations of evolving network protocols."
The Human Brain... the most complex and amazing computer ever built. The more we learn about it and how it works the more we can apply to computers. Imagine the computational power of the mind put to something specific.
I dont know what im talking about... but its cool anyway.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
"Junk" in DNA (e.g., "latent" DNA) is probably not junk, we just don't know the function (yet). No scientist worth their salt would admit that (at least not in earshot of a grant proposal review committee!)
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
That'll come as a relief to Beddoe, who until now assumed that biologists wouldn't pay much heed to his project.
"They're working on uncovering the mysteries of life itself; we're just hacking network protocols," he said. "Which sounds more important to you?"
I don't think Beddoe should cheapen the reverse engineering aspects of networking compared to biology. We may still be years away from finding a cure to cancer, AIDs, etc. and there's a good chance that biology work in this area might not be as fruitful. After all, (without getting into a religious debate, here) man was not created by man, whereas network protocols are. Because of this, it is relatively easier for us to reverse-engineer something that was created by another human, because we know how they think. Evolution or creation, we don't know much about our own building blocks, because we don't know how either God thinks, or the universe fully works.
While his software is great for "hacking network protocols", the biologists paying attention to his work might not find what they are looking for. The inputs very well may be just too vast for his ideas to provide any help.
On the other hand, the Samba team and the Spam Assasin author will most likely enjoy this.
I think that network protocols are not similar to unmapped genome sequences in that network traffic is metadata and data.
Genome sequences are much more consistent. It's all data, processed by RNA computers.
"If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
Both at the gateway and the SMTP server, it seems like sifting through junk to find what matters, and determining common ancestry would be useful anti-spam measures.
At least until the spammers figured out how to make spam look so much like certain types of legit email that we started losing good email...