Yuyao Huang, Hui Shu, Fei Kang^*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.071552 - 12 January 2026

Abstract Message structure reconstruction is a critical task in protocol reverse engineering, aiming to recover protocol field structures without access to source code. It enables important applications in network security, including malware analysis and protocol fuzzing. However, existing methods suffer from inaccurate field boundary delineation and lack hierarchical relationship recovery, resulting in imprecise and incomplete reconstructions. In this paper, we propose ProRE, a novel method for reconstructing protocol field structures based on program execution slice embedding. ProRE extracts code slices from protocol parsing at runtime, converts them into embedding vectors using a data flow-sensitive assembly language model, More >

Jiaxin Shi¹, Lin Ye^1,2,*, Zhongwei Li³, Dongyang Zhan¹

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.130, No.1, pp. 483-498, 2022, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2022.017467 - 29 November 2021

Abstract With the rapid development of the Internet, a large number of private protocols emerge on the network. However, some of them are constructed by attackers to avoid being analyzed, posing a threat to computer network security. The blockchain uses the P2P protocol to implement various functions across the network. Furthermore, the P2P protocol format of blockchain may differ from the standard format specification, which leads to sniffing tools such as Wireshark and Fiddler not being able to recognize them. Therefore, the ability to distinguish different types of unknown network protocols is vital for network security.… More >

Shen Wang^1,*, Fanghui Sun¹, Hongli Zhang¹, Dongyang Zhan^1,2, Shuang Li³, Jun Wang¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.69, No.3, pp. 3711-3725, 2021, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2021.016562 - 24 August 2021

Abstract Internet communication protocols define the behavior rules of network components when they communicate with each other. With the continuous development of network technologies, many private or unknown network protocols are emerging in endlessly various network environments. Herein, relevant protocol specifications become difficult or unavailable to translate in many situations such as network security management and intrusion detection. Although protocol reverse engineering is being investigated in recent years to perform reverse analysis on the specifications of unknown protocols, most existing methods have proven to be time-consuming with limited efficiency, especially when applied on unknown protocol state More >