METHOD TO REMOTELY QUERY, SAFELY MEASURE, AND SECURELY COMMUNICATE CONFIGURATION INFORMATION OF A NETWORKED COMPUTATIONAL DEVICE

摘要

The invention disclosed herein enables a collection of computers and associated communications infrastructure to offer a new communications process which allows a requestor (102) to receive configuration information of a computational device from a responder (103 and 107). The requestor (102) first sends query documents that contain queries for configuration information of a computational device (101) to the responder (103 and 107); the responder automatically collects the answers for the queries and sends a response document that contains the configuration information of the computational device to the requestor. The queries are written in a formal descriptive language which is transparent, safe for network evaluation, and extensible, and the configuration reader of the responder can parse the queries and automatically invoke a set of standard inspectors to obtain the corresponding configuration information.