Protocol signatures are used in part of PSL/PXL.
Packets may arrive out of order or may be legitimate retransmissions of packets that have not yet received an acknowledgment. In some cases a retransmission may also be a deliberate attempt to evade IPS detection by sending the malicious payload in the retransmission. Security Gateway ensures that only valid packets are allowed to proceed to destinations. It does this with Passive Streaming Library (PSL) technology.
If you set the protocol it will be analyzed by PSL/PXL to specify the protocol type such as http, ftp, imap, etc.
More read here:
R80.x Security Gateway Architecture (Content Inspection)
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