Attacking Network Protocols

6APPLICATION REVERSE ENGINEERING

If you can analyze an entire network protocol just by looking at the transmitted data, then your analysis is quite simple. But that’s not always possible with some protocols, especially those that use custom encryption or compression schemes. However, if you can get the executables for the client or server, you can use binary reverse engineering (RE) to determine how the protocol operates and search for vulnerabilities as well.

The two main kinds of reverse engineering are static and dynamic. Static reverse engineering is the process of disassembling a compiled executable into native machine code and using that code to understand how the executable works. Dynamic reverse engineering involves executing an application ...