NET8 Protocol Analysis & Emulation Guided by Dr. Ran Giladi Students: Michal Bukai Ran Steinherz

Background & Motivation o The Problem o The Conventional Solution. o Infocyclone ’ s Solution - sTrieve. o Database-Oriented Middleware. o NET8 protocol.

The problem  Increased number and complexity of inquiries and reports which overload on the operational database.  The resource contention between online transaction processing create major performance bottlenecks.

The Conventional Solution Database  Running reports an queries against a replica database.  This solution is expensive and complex.  DBA: complexity and unwanted administrative and performance overhead.  Cost: purchasing, maintaining and supporting additional database servers and software licenses.

Infocyclone ’ s Solution - sTrieve Infocyclone ’ s product – sTrieve, addresses these key issues: Performance Load reduction Simplicity cost saving

sTrieve sTrieve is a transparent appliance that: 1. Monitoring the SQL traffic. 2. Identifying “ hot-spots ” in the data. 3. Loading them into the appliance ’ s main memory (thus providing much faster access to this data). 4. Transparently redirects the most resource- consuming queries to the appliance, and executes these queries in the appliance ’ s main memory. Make data retrieval and manipulation extremely fast and reduced CPU usage on the database server, leading to better performance of the overall system.

sTrieve

So, What Is The Problem ?

Database-Oriented Middleware  Database-Oriented middleware is any middleware that facilitates communications with a database.  This middleware allows programs to use SQL requests that will access database without having to know the proprietary ’ s interface to the database.  ODBC and JDBC (Open/Java Database Connectivity) are two open standard application programming interface (API) for accessing a database.  Oracle has a unique interface that ’ s based on NET8 protocol.

NET8 Protocol  NET8 enables services and their applications to communicate as peer to peer applications while residing on different computers end.  Transport Application Failover (TAF) is a foundation technology that is built into NET8 providing single, common interface to all industry standard protocols.  With Transport Network Substrate (TNS) peer-to-peer application connectivity is possible.  The main functions of NET8 are:  Establish a network session  Transfer data between client and server machines  NET8 allows connections to various services, such as Oracle database.

NET8 Protocol Basic Client – Server Connection: client Server NET8 Network client Database

NET8 Protocol  The ability of computers separated by both design and physical location to communicate and interact, accomplished through a process known as stack communication.  Stack communication can be explained by referencing to OSI model.  Stack communication allows Oracle client and server to share, modify, and manipulate data.

Oracle Communication Stack OSI Communication Stack

Motivation  sTrieve can replace ODBC/JDBC interface with it ’ s own but it cannot do so with Oracle ’ s native interface that uses NET8 protocol.  Oracle dominants the database market. Emulating Oracle ’ s native interface, can greatly increase sTrieve ’ s compatibility.

1.Analysis of the NET8 Protocol. 2.Emulation of the NET8 Protocol. Objectives

Analysis of the NET8 Protocol  Finding patterns in NET8 packets :  The format of query packets, sent by the client and the format of the server ’ s response packets.  Distinguishing between different kinds of queries (const/binding variable).

Database קובץ capture clientserver Sniffer pro 1.5 NET8 Protocol Analysis

Tools: Sniffer Pro 1.5 HexCmp WinHex

Sniffer Pro 1.5

HexCmp

NET8 Protocol Analysis Client – Server session. SQL Type – according to the 2 first field, Basic Operation & Function Type. infrastructure of the query & response packets – field name, value, offset (in bytes).

NET8 Protocol Emulation  SQL Emulator – Receive queries from the client and form a valid NET8 response.

Security Native Interfaces – tradeoff between performance and security demands.

THE END