Submission #3: Parsing Protocol Standards ========================================= Authors ------- 1. Stephen McQuistin (University of Glasgow) 2. Vivian Band (University of Glasgow) 3. Colin Perkins (University of Glasgow) Abstract -------- Standards documents have been slow to adopt packet description formalisms that go beyond the limited syntax that can be captured in packet header diagrams. As increasingly complex protocols, like QUIC, are standardised, this is becoming problematic: descriptions of packet formats are often fragmented, incomplete, and difficult to follow, and buggy implementations, that do not conform to the specification, are likely to result. In this talk, I will describe an abstract, intermediate packet representation, that fully captures the syntax of packet formats, can be generated from a range of packet description languages, and can generate packet parser code. By specifying an intermediate representation that can be produced from both existing and novel packet descriptions, we hope to encourage use of more expressive, machine readable, packet descriptions in protocol standards. The design and adoption of such an intermediate representation gives rise to a number of interesting technical and social challenges: I will discuss these challenges, and the solutions developed so far, and seek feedback from the community.