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A Structural Approach to Modeling Encrypted Connections

Presentation
This presentation discusses how the concept of SOL can be applied to model encrypted protocols, including the SSH, SSL, and RDP protocols.
Publisher

Corelight

Topic or Tag

Abstract

To weary network users, encryption provides privacy for data in transit. To network operators and security analysts, encryption hinders visibility. Breaking encryption and inspecting content can be costly and error prone.

By analyzing the lengths and ordering of encrypted data exchanged throughout a connection (i.e., signals that don't require breaking encryption) network monitoring systems can infer protocol state without parsing the content of the connection. By modeling a protocol's state transitions and overlaying that model on a connection's sequence of lengths (SOL), inferences can be made about how the protocol is being use. This provides a sort of compromise between privacy and visibility.

Part of a Collection

FloCon 2020 Presentations

This content was created for a conference series or symposium and does not necessarily reflect the positions and views of the Software Engineering Institute.