Protocol Checking -- Need Some Help

[Kannan Ramanathan]

Currently I am working on a protocol analyzer project. I have traces of that protocol (say a point-2-point data/control protocol) stored in files. My protocol analyzer should check for the syntactic correctness as well as the semantic correctness (the correct flow/order as specified in the Spec). Since we decided against hardcoding all the rule-checkings in the main program, the rules are put in a separate file & the inference engine loads these rules and checks for the validity of the data (from the trace files). I thought of embedding a prolog interpreter and writing all the rules in the predicate format. But, this seems to take a pretty big performance hit. Also, another idea is, developing an interpreter for a small, powerful embedded language like Lua or SMALL -- the problem here is, these lack the flexibility of a logic programming language like Prolog. I am sort of confused as to which approach I should pursue. Or, is there a better way? I'd appreciate if any of you can share some ideas regarding this with me or any online references to projects which have the same nature. Thx a lot.

[Werdna]

There is a project for checking cryptographic protocols: http://www.cryptyc.org/intro.html you might want to download it, since it's open source maybe you can modify the sources to fit your needs.