Protocols used for communication suffer bloat from a variety of sources, such as support for legacy features or rarely used (and unnecessary) functionality. Traditionally, the Navy subscribes to a blanket adoption of a standard protocol
Benefit: A successful Phase I will produce a limited proof-of-concept application to demonstrate that: a) it is feasible to develop such a tool into a product that will associate protocol features to its implementation/code within the protocol software and perform code transformation to remove undesired features; and b) the level of effort to mature demonstrated concepts into more hardened product ready for use by the Navy. Phase I will provide the foundation for developing a fully functioning software toolset for identifying and tagging protocol features, allowing power users to selectively remove unwanted features and their corresponding code. Being able to remove unwanted features without needing the cooperation of the developer is a tremendous advantage and drastically helps improve the security posture of such systems. As a result, expected transition of these tools could extend to a wide range of government programs interested in improving the security and performance parameters of their software environments. Enterprise IT Management departments would also welcome the removal of unnecessary protocol features for both security and speed.
Keywords: Communications Protocol, Communications Protocol, Protocol Vulnerability, Feature removal, Software Feature Identification, Binary Static Analysis
