automatic signature generation

Hi List:
There have been few studies to propose the automatic generation for
misuse based IDS, like snort (in fact, it is the hot area of research
among IDS researchers). Suddenly, it came into my mind, whether is it
feasible to generate (Good) signatures for all types of attack in an
automatic way (in a black-box environment, where we don't have the
source-code of the vulnerable application)? Perhaps, It is easy
(relatively) to automatically generate signature for flooding type of
attacks. The main cause of my doubt is the observation that it is not
feasible to generate attacks automatically. Usually, an attacker spend
hours to analyze the application and then write an exploit. We don't
have any tool that take, as an input,  the application to be
exploited, and gives us an working exploit (of course, Metasploit
helps us to create exploit). Therefore, the early thought that comes
into my mind is "creating an automated signature generation tool is as
difficult as creating an automated attack generation tool". I would
like to know your opinion on this.

-Sanjay

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