AwesomeREA.org

2019 · Conference paper

Automatic Wireless Protocol Reverse Engineering

Johannes Pohl; Andreas Noack

Infers message formats of proprietary wireless protocols from demodulated physical-layer captures: it aligns messages by preamble and sync word, then uses RSSI and dedicated engines to label length, address, sequence-number and checksum fields, optionally using known addresses or field positions.

Scope and limitations

Only message formats are inferred: preamble, sync, length, address, sequence number and checksum. State-machine inference and payload fields, such as an on/off bit, are out of scope. The method assumes length-efficient binary messages with one preamble and sync word each. Accuracy is measured on 8 generated protocols; 3 real smart-home captures (EnOcean, Homematic BidCoS and an eQ-3 protocol used by RWE Smarthome) serve for performance tests, which the authors call a limited test set.

Why it fits this collection

Extends protocol inference from network-message traces to physical-layer wireless captures, with the field-labeling method implemented in a public analysis tool.

Publication and review details

Venue
13th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 19)
Status
Conference paper
Publication / posting date
August 2019
Date source
The official USENIX BibTeX entry identifies August 2019 for the WOOT 19 workshop publication.

The official USENIX page, its BibTeX entry and the final PDF verify this workshop paper; no DOI or arXiv identifier was verified. The final PDF uses the WOOT 19 underscore path, and the conference/woot19 form returns 404. The PDF carries an Artifact Evaluated 'Passed' badge. The paper names Universal Radio Hacker as its implementation, and the URH README links its automatic field inference to this paper. At the pinned commit the GPL-3.0 repository is archived, its inference code is in src/urh/awre, and the latest release is v2.10.0. URH's WOOT 18 tool paper is a separate publication.

Sources reviewed

Source review only; experiments were not rerun for this collection. Cite the original authors using the linked paper or BibTeX.

Primary sources

  1. https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot19/presentation/pohl
  2. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot19-paper_pohl.pdf
  3. https://www.usenix.org/biblio/export/bibtex/238586
  4. https://github.com/jopohl/urh/blob/1403d92987cc3d01d41aff64250955ce455dabd2/README.md
  5. https://github.com/jopohl/urh/blob/1403d92987cc3d01d41aff64250955ce455dabd2/LICENSE
  6. https://github.com/jopohl/urh/tree/1403d92987cc3d01d41aff64250955ce455dabd2/src/urh/awre
  7. https://github.com/jopohl/urh/releases/tag/v2.10.0