Automatic protocol reverse engineering for industrial control systems with dynamic taint analysis

• Published in: Frontiers of information technology & electronic engineering Vol. 23; no. 3; pp. 351 - 360
• Main Authors: Ma, Rongkuan, Zheng, Hao, Wang, Jingyi, Wang, Mufeng, Wei, Qiang, Wang, Qingxian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hangzhou Zhejiang University Press 01-03-2022; Springer Nature B.V; State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing,Zhengzhou 450001,China%Zhejiang University NGICS Platform,Hangzhou 310000,China
• Subjects: Applications programs; Communications Engineering; Communications traffic; Computer Hardware; Computer Science; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Control systems; Electrical Engineering; Electronics and Microelectronics; Format; Industrial electronics; Instrumentation; Network analysis; Networks; Protocol; Research Article; Reverse engineering; Software engineering; Traffic analysis; TP309.2; ICS协议逆向工程; ICS protocol reverse engineering; Protocol format; Industrial control system (ICS); 协议格式; Dynamic taint analysis; 工业控制系统 (ICS); 动态污点分析
• ISSN: 2095-9184; 2095-9230
• DOI: 10.1631/FITEE.2000709

Proprietary (or semi-proprietary) protocols are widely adopted in industrial control systems (ICSs). Inferring protocol format by reverse engineering is important for many network security applications, e.g., program tests and intrusion detection. Conventional protocol reverse engineering methods have been proposed which are considered time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone. Recently, automatical protocol reverse engineering methods have been proposed which are, however, neither effective in handling binary-based ICS protocols based on network traffic analysis nor accurate in extracting protocol fields from protocol implementations. In this paper, we present a framework called the industrial control system protocol reverse engineering framework (ICSPRF) that aims to extract ICS protocol fields with high accuracy. ICSPRF is based on the key insight that an individual field in a message is typically handled in the same execution context, e.g., basic block (BBL) group. As a result, by monitoring program execution, we can collect the tainted data information processed in every BBL group in the execution trace and cluster it to derive the protocol format. We evaluate our approach with six open-source ICS protocol implementations. The results show that ICSPRF can identify individual protocol fields with high accuracy (on average a 94.3% match ratio). ICSPRF also has a low coarse-grained and overly fine-grained match ratio. For the same metric, ICSPRF is more accurate than AutoFormat (88.5% for all evaluated protocols and 80.0% for binary-based protocols).