Slashdot Mirror
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."
If we could find a way to apply said algorithms to spam at the gateway level.
If that could be implemented somehow (an attached appliance or something), it could drastically cut the amount of spam that goes through.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
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.