Deep packet inspection engine goes open source

[lotuseclat79]

Deep packet inspection engine goes open source.

A leading European vendor of deep packet inspection (DPI) has just open-sourced the detection engine that identifies protocols passing over the Internet—just don't count on learning how it identifies even encrypted BitTorrent and Skype connections.

DPI can (and does) go much further than this, of course; it is used by law enforcement to grab complete copies of particular users' Internet datastreams in investigations, and companies like NebuAd (now defunct) and Phorm (still funct) use it to examine the URLs being visited by users in order to better target advertising to them. ipoque's paper admits to such uses, but calls them "beyond the scope of this paper."

Releasing its detection engine for analysis is meant to allay fears that ipoque's traffic management DPI is a "bad" application of the technology. "By giving the general public access to parts of our DPI engine, we want to demonstrate that many of the alleged privacy violations simply do not happen in DPI bandwidth management systems," says the company, though plenty of Internet users dislike DPI for reasons that have little to do with privacy and have much more to do with concerns over things like network neutrality (however one defines that idea).

An example of second-life detection code is identified at the bottom of the article.

-- Tom

[Dregg Heda]

How can one counter something like this? VPN?