Protocol and Application Awareness: A New Trend or an Established Tradition?
Paul A. Henry · Information Systems Security · 2004
Despite the recent marketing blitz by several high-profile security vendors, protocol anomaly detection (also called protocol awareness) and deep packet inspection (also called application awareness) are not new technologies these vendors conceived to deal with the growing threat of application-layer network attacks on the public Internet. Strong application proxy-based firewalls have incorporated sophisticated protocol and application awareness technologies since first introduced in the 1980s. When compared to offerings from providers of intrusion detection systems (IDSs), intrusion prevention devices (IPDs), and — for that matter — stateful inspection (SI) firewall vendors, it quickly becomes evident that strong application proxy technology is more mature, powerful, and proven in the most demanding network environments.