Itsy Bitsy Protocol Spider

February 2, 2007 by kowsik

In the OOMPH blog I talked about specification coverage and how the effectiveness of attacks can be measured. Part of building object oriented mutations that mimic the design and interconnectedness of protocols, is to leverage attacks on referenced structures in related protocols. But how are protocols related?

In very intricate ways. We call this relationship Six Degrees of Protocols. In other words, if we are mutating on SIP, we are completely leveraging all of the structures/semantics/attacks from HTTP, LDAP and all of the other protocols it references. The applet below is a slightly modified TouchGraph browser, that shows this linkage visually. I just picked a sample set of 1000 RFC’s starting with HTTP. It could’ve been any specification of any protocol, but RFC’s are easy to grep for, to extract the references.

Here’s the RFC Spider. Use the scroll bar at the bottom to zoom and rotate. Clicking on any of the RFC title’s shows you other RFC’s that are upto 3 hops away. Starting from HTTP see if you can get to L2TP or GRE. If you completely get lost, hit refresh on your browser. :-)

If you don’t feel like running Java, here’s an HTML/Javascript version. The RFC references have been converted into a JSON Hash, which makes the cross-referencing and title search pretty simple.

Categories: Mutations, Research
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