Protocol Analysis

Protocol Analysis, under Reverse Engineering in the Reconnaissance phase, involves intercepting, parsing, and interpreting the communication protocols used by applications and systems to understand how they transmit data. Security analysts examine protocol structure, message formats, field types, and serialization methods to identify security gaps such as unencrypted sensitive data, lack of integrity checks, flawed authentication mechanisms, or insecure session management. This process requires specialized tools like Wireshark, Burp Suite, or custom protocol dissectors, combined with techniques such as proxy interception, packet capture analysis, and sometimes cryptographic analysis to decode encrypted communications. By thoroughly understanding a target application's communication protocols, attackers can discover vulnerabilities, engineer malicious messages, bypass security controls, or perform man-in-the-middle attacks—making protocol analysis a critical but technically complex reconnaissance activity that often yields high-value intelligence about application security architecture.