Open AccessProtocol State Machine Reverse Engineering with a Teaching-Learning Approach
Author(s) -
Gábor Székely,
Gergő Ládi,
Tamás Holczer,
Levente Buttyán
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
acta cybernetica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.143
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 2676-993X
pISSN - 0324-721X
DOI - 10.14232/actacyb.288213
Subject(s) - computer science , protocol (science) , modbus , reverse engineering , state (computer science) , simple (philosophy) , distributed computing , finite state machine , abstract state machines , mqtt , communications protocol , artificial intelligence , computer network , embedded system , algorithm , programming language , internet of things , medicine , philosophy , alternative medicine , epistemology , pathology
In this work, we propose a novel solution to the problem of inferring the state machine of an unknown protocol. We extend and improve prior results on inferring Mealy machines, and present a new algorithm that accesses and interacts with a networked system that runs the unknown protocol in order to infer the Mealy machine representing the protocol's state machine. To demonstrate the viability of our approach, we provide an implementation and illustrate the operation of our algorithm on a simple example protocol, as well as on two real-world protocols, Modbus and MQTT.