List of (automatic) protocol reverse engineering tools/methods/approaches for network protocols
This is a collection of 71 scientific papers about (automatic) protocol reverse engineering (PRE) methods and tools. The papers are categorized into different groups so that it is more easy to get an overview of existing solutions based on the problem you want to tackle.
The collection is based on the following three surveys and got extended afterwards:
- J. Narayan, S. K. Shukla, and T. C. Clancy, “A Survey of Automatic Protocol Reverse Engineering Tools,” ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 1–26, Feb. 2016, doi: 10.1145/2840724. PDF
- J. Duchêne, C. Le Guernic, E. Alata, V. Nicomette, and M. Kaâniche, “State of the art of network protocol reverse engineering tools,” Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 53–68, Feb. 2018, doi: 10.1007/s11416-016-0289-8. PDF
- B. D. Sija, Y.-H. Goo, K.-S. Shim, H. Hasanova, and M.-S. Kim, “A Survey of Automatic Protocol Reverse Engineering Approaches, Methods, and Tools on the Inputs and Outputs View,” Security and Communication Networks, vol. 2018, pp. 1–17, 2018, doi: 10.1155/2018/8370341. PDF
Furthermore, there is a very extensive surveys which focuses on the methods and approaches of PRE tools that are based on network traces. The work of Kleber et al. is an excellent starting point to see what was already tried and for which use cases a method is working best.
- S. Kleber, L. Maile, and F. Kargl, “Survey of Protocol Reverse Engineering Algorithms: Decomposition of Tools for Static Traffic Analysis,” IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 526–561, 2019, doi: 10.1109/COMST.2018.2867544. PDF
Please help extending this collection by adding papers to the tools.ods.
Overview ↑
| Name | Year | Approach used |
|---|---|---|
| PIP [1] | 2004 | Keyword detection and Sequence alignment based on Needleman and Wunsch 1970 and Smith and Waterman 1981; this approach was applied and extended by many following papers |
| GAPA [2] | 2005 | Protocol analyzer and open language that uses the protocol analyzer specification Spec → it is meant to be integrated in monitoring and analyzing tools |
| ScriptGen [3] | 2005 | Grouping and clustering messages, find edges from clusters to clusters for being able to replay messages once a similar message arrives |
| RolePlayer [4] | 2006 | Byte-wise sequence alignment (find variable fields in messages) and clustering with FSM simplification |
| Ma et al. [5] | 2006 | Please review |
| FFE/x86 [6] | 2006 | Please review |
| Replayer [7] | 2006 | Please review |
| Discoverer [8] | 2007 | Tokenization of messages, recursive clustering to find formats, merge similar formats |
| Polyglot [9] | 2007 | Dynamic taint-analysis |
| PEXT [10] | 2007 | Message clustering for creating FSM graph and simplify FSM graph |
| Rosetta [11] | 2007 | Please review |
| AutoFormat [12] | 2008 | Dynamic taint-analysis |
| Tupni [13] | 2008 | Dynamic taint-analysis; look for loops to identify boundaries within messages |
| Boosting [14] | 2008 | Please review |
| ConfigRE [15] | 2008 | Please review |
| ReFormat [16] | 2009 | Dynamic taint-analysis, especially targeting encrypted protocols by looking for bitwise and arithmetic operations |
| Prospex [17] | 2009 | Dynamic taint-analysis with following message clustering, optionally provides fuzzing candidates for Peach fuzzer |
| Xiao et al. [18] | 2009 | Please review |
| Trifilo et al. [19] | 2009 | Measure byte-wise variances in aligned messages |
| Antunes and Neves [20] | 2009 | Please review |
| Dispatcher [21] | 2009 | Dynamic taint-analysis (successor of Polyglot using send instead of received messages) |
| Fuzzgrind [22] | 2009 | Please review |
| REWARDS [23] | 2010 | Please review |
| MACE [24] | 2010 | Please review |
| Whalen et al. [25] | 2010 | Please review |
| AutoFuzz [26] | 2010 | Please review |
| ReverX [27] | 2011 | Speech recognition (thus only for text-based protocols) to find carriage returns and spaces, afterwards looking for frequencies of keywords; multiple partial FSMs are merged and simplified to get PFSM |
| Veritas [28] | 2011 | Identifiying keywords, clustering and transition probability → probabilistic protocol state machine |
| Biprominer [29] | 2011 | Statistical analysis including three phases, learning phase, labeling phase and transition probability model building phase. See this figure. |
| ASAP [30] | 2011 | Please review |
| Howard [31] | 2011 | Please review |
| ProDecoder [32] | 2012 | Successor of Biprominer which also addresses text-based protocols; two-phases are used: first apply Biprominer, second use Needleman-Wunsch for alignment |
| Zhang et al. [33] | 2012 | Please review |
| Netzob [34] | 2012 | See this figure |
| PRISMA [35] | 2012 | Please review, follow-up paper/project to ASAP |
| ARTISTE [36] | 2012 | Please review |
| Wang et al. [37] | 2013 | Capturing of data, identifying frames and inferring the format by looking and frequency of frames and doing association analysis (using Apriori and FP-Growth). |
| Laroche et al. [38] | 2013 | Please review |
| AutoReEngine [39] | 2013 | Apriori Algorithm (based on Agrawal/Srikant 1994). Identify fields and keywords by considering the amount of occurrences. Message formats are considered as series of keywords. State machines are derived from labeled messages or frequent subsequences. See this figure for clarification. |
| Dispatcher2 [40] | 2013 | Please review |
| ProVeX [41] | 2013 | Identify Botnet traffic and try to infer the botnet type by using signatures |
| Meng et al. [42] | 2014 | Please review |
| AFL [43] | 2014 | Please review |
| Proword [44] | 2014 | Please review |
| ProGraph [45] | 2015 | Please review |
| FieldHunter [46] | 2015 | Please review |
| RS Cluster [47] | 2015 | Please review |
| UPCSS [48] | 2015 | Please review |
| ARGOS [49] | 2015 | Please review |
| PULSAR [50] | 2015 | Reverse engineer network protocols with the aim to fuzz them with thus knowledge |
| Li et al. [51] | 2015 | Please review |
| Cai et al. [52] | 2016 | Please review |
| WASp [53] | 2016 | Pcap files are provided with context information (i.e. known MAC address), then grouping and analysing (looking for CRC, N-gram, Entropy, Features, Ranges), afterwards report creation based on scoring. |
| PRE-Bin [54] | 2016 | Please review |
| Xiao et al. [55] | 2016 | Please review |
| PowerShell [56] | 2017 | Please review |
| ProPrint [57] | 2017 | Please review |
| ProHacker [58] | 2017 | Please review |
| Esoul and Walkinshaw [59] | 2017 | Please review |
| PREUGI [60] | 2017 | Please review |
| NEMESYS [61] | 2018 | Please review |
| Goo et al. [62] | 2019 | Apriori based: Finding „frequent contiguous common subsequences“ via new Contiguous Sequential Pattern (CSP) algorithm which is based on Generalized Sequential Pattern (GSP) and other Apriori algorithms. CSP is used three times hierarchically to extract different information/fields based on previous results. |
| Universal Radio Hacker [63] | 2019 | Physical layer based analysis of proprietary wireless protocols considering wireless specific properties like Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and using statistical methods |
| Luo et al. [64] | 2019 | From abstract: “[…] this study proposes a type-aware approach to message clustering guided by type information. The approach regards a message as a combination of n-grams, and it employs the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to characterize messages with types and n-grams via inferring the type distribution of each message.” |
| Sun et al. [65] | 2019 | Please review |
| Yang et al. [66] | 2020 | Using deep-learning (LSTM-FCN) for reversing binary protocols |
| Sun et al. [67] | 2020 | "To measure format similarity of unknown protocol messages in a proper granularity, we propose relative measurements, Token Format Distance (TFD) and Message Format Distance (MFD), based on core rules of Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABND)." for clustering process Silhouette Coefficient and Dunn Index are used. density based cluster algorithm DBSCAN is used for clustering of messages |
| Shim et al. [68] | 2020 | Follow up on Goo et al. 2019 |
| IPART [69] | 2020 | Using extended voting expert algorithm to infer boundaries of fields, otherwise using three phase which are tokenizing, classifying and clustering. |
| NEMETYL [70] | 2020 | Please review |
| NetPlier [71] | 2021 | Probabilistic method for network trace based protocol reverse engineering. |
Input and Output ↑
NetT: input is a network trace (e.g. pcap)
ExeT: input is an execution trace (code/binary at hand)
PF: output is protocol format (describing the syntax)
PFSM: output is protocol finite state machine (describing semantic/sequential logic)
| Name | Year | NetT | ExeT | PF | PFSM | Other Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PIP [1] | 2004 | ✔ | Keywords/ fields | |||
| GAPA [2] | 2005 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| ScriptGen [3] | 2005 | ✔ | Dialogs/scripts (for replaying) | |||
| RolePlayer [4] | 2006 | ✔ | Dialogs/scripts | |||
| Ma et al. [5] | 2006 | ✔ | App-identification | |||
| FFE/x86 [6] | 2006 | ✔ | ||||
| Replayer [7] | 2006 | ✔ | ||||
| Discoverer [8] | 2007 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Polyglot [9] | 2007 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| PEXT [10] | 2007 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Rosetta [11] | 2007 | ✔ | ||||
| AutoFormat [12] | 2008 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Tupni [13] | 2008 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Boosting [14] | 2008 | ✔ | Field(s) | |||
| ConfigRE [15] | 2008 | ✔ | ||||
| ReFormat [16] | 2009 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Prospex [17] | 2009 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Xiao et al. [18] | 2009 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Trifilo et al. [19] | 2009 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Antunes and Neves [20] | 2009 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Dispatcher [21] | 2009 | ✔ | C&C malware | |||
| Fuzzgrind [22] | 2009 | ✔ | ||||
| REWARDS [23] | 2010 | ✔ | ||||
| MACE [24] | 2010 | ✔ | ||||
| Whalen et al. [25] | 2010 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| AutoFuzz [26] | 2010 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| ReverX [27] | 2011 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Veritas [28] | 2011 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Biprominer [29] | 2011 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| ASAP [30] | 2011 | ✔ | Semantics | |||
| Howard [31] | 2011 | ✔ | ||||
| ProDecoder [32] | 2012 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Zhang et al. [33] | 2012 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Netzob [34] | 2012 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| PRISMA [35] | 2012 | ✔ | ||||
| ARTISTE [36] | 2012 | ✔ | ||||
| Wang et al. [37] | 2013 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Laroche et al. [38] | 2013 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| AutoReEngine [39] | 2013 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Dispatcher2 [40] | 2013 | ✔ | C&C malware | |||
| ProVeX [41] | 2013 | ✔ | Signatures | |||
| Meng et al. [42] | 2014 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| AFL [43] | 2014 | ✔ | ||||
| Proword [44] | 2014 | |||||
| ProGraph [45] | 2015 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| FieldHunter [46] | 2015 | ✔ | Fields | |||
| RS Cluster [47] | 2015 | ✔ | Grouped-messages | |||
| UPCSS [48] | 2015 | ✔ | Proto-classification | |||
| ARGOS [49] | 2015 | ✔ | ||||
| PULSAR [50] | 2015 | |||||
| Li et al. [51] | 2015 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Cai et al. [52] | 2016 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| WASp [53] | 2016 | ✔ | ✔ | scored analysis reports, spoofing candidates | ||
| PRE-Bin [54] | 2016 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Xiao et al. [55] | 2016 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| PowerShell [56] | 2017 | ✔ | Dialogs/scripts | |||
| ProPrint [57] | 2017 | ✔ | Fingerprints | |||
| ProHacker [58] | 2017 | ✔ | Keywords | |||
| Esoul and Walkinshaw [59] | 2017 | |||||
| PREUGI [60] | 2017 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| NEMESYS [61] | 2018 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Goo et al. [62] | 2019 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Universal Radio Hacker [63] | 2019 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Luo et al. [64] | 2019 | |||||
| Sun et al. [65] | 2019 | |||||
| Yang et al. [66] | 2020 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Sun et al. [67] | 2020 | |||||
| Shim et al. [68] | 2020 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| IPART [69] | 2020 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| NEMETYL [70] | 2020 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| NetPlier [71] | 2021 | ✔ |
Tested protocols ↑
| Name | Year | Text-based | Binary-based | Hybrid | Other Protocols |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PIP [1] | 2004 | HTTP | |||
| GAPA [2] | 2005 | HTTP | |||
| ScriptGen [3] | 2005 | HTTP | NetBIOS | DCE | |
| RolePlayer [4] | 2006 | HTTP, FTP, SMTP, NFS, TFTP | DNS, BitTorrent, QQ, NetBios | SMB, CIFS | |
| Ma et al. [5] | 2006 | HTTP, FTP, SMTP, HTTPS (TCP-Protos) | DNS, NetBIOS, SrvLoc (UDP-Protos) | ||
| FFE/x86 [6] | 2006 | ||||
| Replayer [7] | 2006 | ||||
| Discoverer [8] | 2007 | HTTP | RPC | SMB, CIFS | |
| Polyglot [9] | 2007 | HTTP, Samba, ICQ | DNS, IRC | ||
| PEXT [10] | 2007 | FTP | |||
| Rosetta [11] | 2007 | ||||
| AutoFormat [12] | 2008 | HTTP, SIP | DHCP, RIP, OSPF | SMB, CIFS | |
| Tupni [13] | 2008 | HTTP, FTP | RPC, DNS, TFTP | WMF, BMP, JPG, PNG, TIF | |
| Boosting [14] | 2008 | DNS | |||
| ConfigRE [15] | 2008 | ||||
| ReFormat [16] | 2009 | HTTP, MIME | IRC | One unknown protocol | |
| Prospex [17] | 2009 | SMTP, SIP | SMB | Agobot (C&C) | |
| Xiao et al. [18] | 2009 | HTTP, FTP, SMTP | |||
| Trifilo et al. [19] | 2009 | TCP, DHCP, ARP, KAD | |||
| Antunes and Neves [20] | 2009 | FTP | |||
| Dispatcher [21] | 2009 | HTTP, FTP, ICQ | DNS | ||
| Fuzzgrind [22] | 2009 | ||||
| REWARDS [23] | 2010 | ||||
| MACE [24] | 2010 | ||||
| Whalen et al. [25] | 2010 | ||||
| AutoFuzz [26] | 2010 | ||||
| ReverX [27] | 2011 | FTP | |||
| Veritas [28] | 2011 | SMTP | PPLIVE, XUNLEI | ||
| Biprominer [29] | 2011 | XUNLEI, QQLive, SopCast | |||
| ASAP [30] | 2011 | HTTP, FTP, IRC, TFTP | |||
| Howard [31] | 2011 | ||||
| ProDecoder [32] | 2012 | SMTP, SIP | SMB | ||
| Zhang et al. [33] | 2012 | HTTP, SNMP, ISAKMP | |||
| Netzob [34] | 2012 | FTP, Samba | SMB | Unknown P2P & VoIP protocol | |
| PRISMA [35] | 2012 | ||||
| ARTISTE [36] | 2012 | ||||
| Wang et al. [37] | 2013 | ICMP | ARP | ||
| Laroche et al. [38] | 2013 | FTP | DHCP | ||
| AutoReEngine [39] | 2013 | HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3 | DNS, NetBIOS | ||
| Dispatcher2 [40] | 2013 | HTTP, FTP, ICQ | DNS | SMB | |
| ProVeX [41] | 2013 | HTTP, SMTP, IMAP | DNS, VoIP, XMPP | Malware Family Protocols | |
| Meng et al. [42] | 2014 | TCP, ARP | |||
| AFL [43] | 2014 | ||||
| Proword [44] | 2014 | ||||
| ProGraph [45] | 2015 | HTTP | DNS, BitTorrent, WeChat | ||
| FieldHunter [46] | 2015 | MSNP | DNS | SopCast, Ramnit | |
| RS Cluster [47] | 2015 | FTP, SMTP, POP3, HTTPS | DNS, XunLei, BitTorrent, BitSpirit, QQ, eMule | MSSQL, Kugoo, PPTV | |
| UPCSS [48] | 2015 | HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP | DNS, SSL, SSH | SMB | |
| ARGOS [49] | 2015 | ||||
| PULSAR [50] | 2015 | ||||
| Li et al. [51] | 2015 | ||||
| Cai et al. [52] | 2016 | HTTP, SSDP | DNS, BitTorrent, QQ, NetBios | ||
| WASp [53] | 2016 | IEEE 802.15.4 proprietary protocols, Smart plug & PSD systems | |||
| PRE-Bin [54] | 2016 | ||||
| Xiao et al. [55] | 2016 | ||||
| PowerShell [56] | 2017 | ARP, OSPF, DHCP, STP | CDP/DTP/VTP, HSRP, LLDP, LLMNR, mDNS, NBNS, VRRP | ||
| ProPrint [57] | 2017 | ||||
| ProHacker [58] | 2017 | ||||
| Esoul and Walkinshaw [59] | 2017 | ||||
| PREUGI [60] | 2017 | ||||
| NEMESYS [61] | 2018 | ||||
| Goo et al. [62] | 2019 | HTTP | DNS | ||
| Universal Radio Hacker [63] | 2019 | proprietary wireless protocols of IoT devices | |||
| Luo et al. [64] | 2019 | ||||
| Sun et al. [65] | 2019 | ||||
| Yang et al. [66] | 2020 | IPv4, TCP | |||
| Sun et al. [67] | 2020 | ||||
| Shim et al. [68] | 2020 | FTP | Modbus/TCP, Ethernet/IP | ||
| IPART [69] | 2020 | Modbus, IEC104, Ethernet/IP | |||
| NEMETYL [70] | 2020 | ||||
| NetPlier [71] | 2021 |
Source Code ↑
Most papers do not provide the code used in the research. For the following papers exists (example) code.
| Name | Year | Source Code |
|---|---|---|
| PIP [1] | 2004 | https://web.archive.org/web/20090416234849/http://4tphi.net/~awalters/PI/PI.html |
| ReverX [27] | 2011 | https://github.com/jasantunes/reverx |
| Netzob [34] | 2012 | https://github.com/netzob/netzob |
| PRISMA [35] | 2012 | https://github.com/tammok/PRISMA/ |
| PULSAR [50] | 2015 | https://github.com/hgascon/pulsar |
| NEMESYS [61] | 2018 | https://github.com/vs-uulm/nemesys |
| Universal Radio Hacker [63] | 2019 | https://github.com/jopohl/urh |
| NetPlier [71] | 2021 | https://github.com/netplier-tool/NetPlier/ |
References ↑
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