Dynamic Protocol Reverse Engineering a Grammatical Inference Approach

Round trip engineering of software from source code and reverse engineering of software from binary files have both been extensively studied and the state-of-practice have documented tools and techniques. Forward engineering of protocols has also been extensively studied and there are firmly established techniques for generating correct protocols. While observation of protocol behavior for performance testing has been studied and techniques established, reverse engineering of protocol control flow from observations of protocol behavior has not received the same level of attention. State-of-practice in reverse engineering the control flow of computer network protocols is comprised of mostly ad hoc approaches. We examine state-of-practice tools and techniques used in three open source projects: Pidgin, Samba, and rdesktop . We examine techniques proposed by computational learning researchers for grammatical inference. We propose to extend the state-of-art by inferring protocol control flow using grammatical inference inspired techniques to reverse engineer automata representations from captured data flows. We present evidence that grammatical inference is applicable to the problem domain under consideration

Application of backend database contents and structure to the design of spoken dialog services

Current development platforms for designing spoken dialog services feature different kinds of strategies to help designers build, test, and deploy their applications. In general, these platforms are made up of several assistants that handle the different design stages (e.g. definition of the dialog flow, prompt and grammar definition, database connection, or to debug and test the running of the application). In spite of all the advances in this area, in general the process of designing spoken-based dialog services is a time consuming task that needs to be accelerated. In this paper we describe a complete development platform that reduces the design time by using different types of acceleration strategies based on using information from the data model structure and database contents, as well as cumulative information obtained throughout the successive steps in the design. Thanks to these accelerations, the interaction with the platform is simplified and the design is reduced, in most cases, to simple confirmations to the “proposals” that the platform automatically provides at each stage. Different kinds of proposals are available to complete the application flow such as the possibility of selecting which information slots should be requested to the user together, predefined templates for common dialogs, the most probable actions that make up each state defined in the flow, different solutions to solve specific speech-modality problems such as the presentation of the lists of retrieved results after querying the backend database. The platform also includes accelerations for creating speech grammars and prompts, and the SQL queries for accessing the database at runtime. Finally, we will describe the setup and results obtained in a simultaneous summative, subjective and objective evaluations with different designers used to test the usability of the proposed accelerations as well as their contribution to reducing the design time and interaction

Enhanced PL-WAP tree method for incremental mining of sequential patterns.

Sequential mining as web usage mining has been used in improving web site design, increasing volume of e-business and providing marketing decision support. This thesis proposes PL4UP and EPL4UP algorithms which use the PLWAP tree structure to incrementally update sequential patterns. PL4UP does not scan old DB except when previous small 1-itemsets become large in updated database during which time its scans only all transactions in the old database that contain any small itemsets. EPL4UP rebuilds the old PLWAP tree using only the list of previous small itemsets once rather than scanning the entire old database twice like original PLWAP. PL4UP and EPL4UP first update old frequent patterns on the small PLWAP tree built for only the incremented part of the database, then they compare new added patterns generated from the small tree with the old frequent patterns to reduce the number of patterns to be checked on the old PLWAP tree. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2003 .C47. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 42-03, page: 0959. Adviser: Christie Ezeife. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2003