Halberd 0.2.1 is out!

I just released the next revision (0.2.1) of halberd, my load balancer detection tool. If you’re curious about the way the program works, you can read this part of the user’s guide.

Halberd has been tested in real world scenarios for quite some time and it seems to be solid. I hope the wider audience it is gaining now will uncover some bugs and after fixing those I’ll think of it as stable software. Future work could happen in the following areas:

• Clustering algorithm
• The module Halberd.clues.analysis currently implements an ad-hoc hierarchical clustering algorithm to isolate possible real servers. I would like halberd to report to the user the degree of trust he should place in its conclusions.
• I think the way to go would be to test some algorithms in R (fuzzy clustering comes to mind) using real world data and see what works best before implementing anything.
• SSL session reuse
• When an SSL/TLS session begins, the server issues an SSL session ID to the client. This ID will be used to resume transactions between client and server (remember the stateless nature of HTTP).
• Some load balancers can keep track of which real server dealt with which SSL session and direct the client to the right server (the one having the client’s session ID in its cache). This could be used by halberd as an extra technique to enumerate real servers.
• Test suite improvements
• The test harness is tied to my own development environment. This should change.
• More tests never hurt.