BinPRE: Enhancing Field Inference in Binary Analysis Based Protocol Reverse Engineering
Jiayi Jiang, Xiyuan Zhang, Chengcheng Wan, Haoyi Chen, Haiying Sun, Ting Su · 2024
Protocol reverse engineering (PRE) aims to infer the specification of network protocols when the source code is not available. Specifically, field inference is one crucial step in PRE to infer the field formats and semantics. To perform field inference, binary analysis based PRE techniques are one major approach category. However, such techniques face two key challenges --- (1) the format inference is fragile when the logics of processing input messages may vary among different protocol implementations, and (2) the semantic inference is limited by inadequate and inaccurate inference rules.