Programming Languages and Translators: Language Proposal

This paper describes a language for identifying communication protocols and extracting fields and values, referred to as metadata, from a set of packets in a capture file. To simplify the language runtime, restrict the input to packets beginning with an IPv4 header shall restrict. This eliminates the need to identify data-link layer protocols, which typically require finding chains of packets that exhibit similar values at specific byte offsets in each packet. For the purposes of this project, such chaining serves only to complicate the runtime and does not enrich the language itself. The output of a program written in the language will be a set of events, one for each packet that matches the identification algorithms contained in the program.