Besides their everyday work devoted to securing the infrastructure of PSNC and PIONIER & POZMAN networks, as well as participation to R&D projects, PSNC Security team conduct a lot of research, which is often not related with IT security at first glance.

Recently, Mateusz Drygas and Tomasz Nowak have been investigating the opportunity of applying tools for biological sequence alignment to optimize fuzzing techniques (namely – to support recognition the structures of file formats and network protocols. It appears that after having transformed particular concept from the world of networking towards the area of biological sequence alignment, it is possible to use free and well-proven bioinformatics tools in order to significantly accelerate the analysis of acquired network traffic.

They presented the results of the research during the international IT security conference – Confidence 2010 2.0 that took place in Prague (Czech Republic) on November 29-30. During the second day of the conference Tomasz Nowak gave a talk entitled “Discovery and visualization of network protocols with tools for biological sequence alignment”. The talk on the mentioned subject triggered an interesting discussion that created an opportunity to exchange opinions with authors of other fuzzers.

During the conference a number of lectures on different technical levels were given. The selected topics include: social attacks, using tools for extracting metadata from documents, IPv6 security or debugging application and network protocols with low-level programming. During the breaks and the evening events the lecturers could share their experience with the participants, and also many talks, addressing IT security in general, were held.

We encourage you to read the prepared presentation, available in English as a PDF file: http://security.psnc.pl/files/confidence_201002.pdf

PSNC Security Team: http://security.pnsc.pl/en