A Survey on Protocol Reverse Engineering for Industrial Control Protocols and Its Potential With Collaborative Learning

Cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs) integrate network technologies, physical devices, and social factors to enable real-time perception, collaboration, and decision-making. Industrial control systems are critical to CPSS, and industrial control protocols (ICPs) are key to enabling device communication. However, the proprietary nature of many commercial ICPs hinders interoperability and complicates defenses against cyber threats. Protocol reverse engineering (PRE) has emerged as a promising technology for deriving unknown protocol specifications, offering an effective solution to this challenge. Despite its significance, there still lacks a comprehensive survey on PRE methods for ICPs grounded in a systematic evaluation framework. To bridge this gap, we review recent advances in PRE methods for ICPs and provide a thorough survey of existing approaches. We propose a set of evaluation criteria to assess PRE methods in terms of effectiveness, applicability, and efficiency, based on which we examine current methods and explore the potential of collaborative learning in PRE. We further identify open issues and suggest several promising directions for future research.