In the new world of next-generation networks, pretty much every leading network equipment manufacturer (NEM) today has application-awareness built into their products. Whether it’s an application firewall, serving gateway or edge router, they’re all using deep packet inspection (DPI) to look deep into the network traffic to identify the specific application.
For example, Cisco has Application Visibility & Control, Juniper has AppSecure, Palo Alto Networks has App-ID, Sandvine has Traffic Identification and Tellabs has Application Identification.
Each vendor has their own proprietary database comprised of hundreds or thousands of application signatures and on finding a match, their system can then take action based on the defined policy (e.g. block an application, apply QoS, etc…)
Before these new application signatures are released however, testing is needed to ensure the accuracy of the detection. One of the major challenges is to avoid the false positive, in which an application is misclassified.
