SEMPRE: Semantic-Aware Protocol Reverse Engineering via Consistency-Driven Joint Optimization

Summary

SEMPRE is a fully automated protocol reverse engineering framework that replaces hand-written rules with recursive LLM reasoning grounded in dynamic program analysis, using taint-flow and loop traces. It segments messages into fields, detects nested sub-payloads, infers field types and roles, and refines boundaries in an EM-style loop until convergence. Evaluated on mainstream protocols against six baselines, it reports a field-boundary score above the baselines' 0.4 and 0.72 for semantic inference versus 0.13 for BinPRE.