application featureprinting: the art of identifying different versions and flavors of applications which use the same protocol by their implementations (or lack thereof) of protocol features.

did this last year for smtp... it's simple: take a protocol rfc and the most popular implementations of said protocol, write a quick test script to check all possible commands and error codes, and throw it against anything you can get your hands on. though of sticking it up here since i'm doing ftp. must be a couple dozen ftp commands, but only like 16 are needed to properly differentiate application vendors.

this is cool because admins can change their banners all they want, and i'll still know exactly what they're running. in many cases down to the app version and patch level. fun.

application fingerprinting, almost the same as application featureprinting except for i just made a buzzword.