Hello,
I am currently working in a network development environment and I described to
my supervisor the LANGSEC view. He was quite excited and interested about the
concept of shotgun parser, weird machines and in general the view on untrusted
input as a formal language. But then he told me that in the networking
environment you have to think in parallel and the LANGSEC idea is probably very
different in such an environment. He was talking about the Switches and
Routers, which have dozens of cables to process packets in parallel
(forwarding, rerouting or setting up internal databases). So basically you have
independent automata interacting with each other through messages. I naively
thought that those devices can be simplified viewed as "an abstract overlaid
automata" where you can have the input packets A and B as either coming after
each other ("AB", "BA") or in parallel which can be represented as a new symbol
C (A and B arriving in parallel).
Formal Languages and automata theory was only a little bit covered in my
university, so I made a quick google search for "parallel automata" and it
revealed a lot of university resources. I want to look into those, but in the
meantime I wanted to start this discussion here to see, what you all think
about parallel automata and the LANGSEC view on it.
kind regards,
fabian
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