Liu and his Ph.D. students Shafiq & Wang received Best Paper Award at the 20th IEEE International Conf on Network Protocols

Alex X. Liu, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and his Ph.D. students Zubair Shafiq and Liyan Wang, recently received the Best Paper Award at the 20th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Austin, Texas, October 2012. The paper is titled "A Semantics Aware Approach to Automated Reverse Engineering Unknown Protocol". This work is conducted in collaboration with a group of researchers in China including Yipeng Wang, Xiaochun Yun, Zhibin Zhang, Yongzheng Zhang, and Li Guo, as well as Danfeng(Daphne) Yao from Virginia Tech. ICNP is one of the few top conferences in the computer networking field and deals with all aspects of communication protocols, from design and specification, to verification, testing, performance analysis, and implementation.

Extracting the protocol message format specifications of unknown applications from network traces is important for a variety of applications such as application protocol parsing, vulnerability discovery, and system integration. In this work, Professor Liu, along with his Ph.D. students and collaborators, proposed ProDecoder, a network trace based protocol message format inference system that exploits the semantics of protocol messages without the executable code of application protocols.

(Date Posted: 2012-11-06)