An Automatic Network Protocol State Machine Inference Method in Protocol Reverse Engineering

Abstract

To infer the network protocol state machine is very useful in network security-related contexts, both in research and management. This process follows an extension of the classic Angluins L* algorithm and has achieved an extended version of some Mealy automata to represent or model a communication protocol. The algorithm has been validated by inferring the protocol state machine from SMTPFTP protocol, and tested offline algorithms for the comparison experiments. The experimental results show that this method can more accurately identify the network protocol state machine and is of the important application value.