reversing-network-protocols

reversing-network-protocols is a skill for Claude Code from trilwu/secskills. It costs 94 tokens per session (1,310 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for decoding an undocumented binary network protocol from packet captures and the client that uses it.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for identifying message boundaries, fields, operation codes, checksums, or encryption, then building parsers or tools for Wireshark, Kaitai Struct, or Scapy.
Why use it?
It helps explain raw network bytes when no public protocol specification or built-in packet decoder exists.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the secskills-core plugin — 30 skills shipped together

Good fit It is for identifying message boundaries, fields, operation codes, checksums, or encryption, then building parsers or tools for Wireshark, Kaitai Struct, or Scapy.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/trilwu/secskills/reversing-network-protocols
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add trilwu/secskills --skill reversing-network-protocols
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/trilwu/secskills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install secskills-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 30 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for reversing-network-protocols

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/reversing-network-protocols/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/reversing-network-protocols)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/reversing-network-protocols"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/reversing-network-protocols/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for reversing-network-protocols

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/reversing-network-protocols"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/reversing-network-protocols.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,310 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00094 $0.01310
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.00655
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00262
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00131

Measured 9d ago against content hash a796b4083597, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reversing-network-protocols scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

secskills-core/skills/reversing-network-protocols/SKILL.md · 112 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 112 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reversing Network Protocols

An undocumented binary protocol is reverse-engineered from two sides at once: the wire, which shows you the bytes that actually flow, and the client, which shows you the code that produced them. Neither alone is enough — the capture tells you what varies, the client tells you why — and the deliverable is a parser precise enough to decode, replay, and eventually fuzz the protocol.

When to Use

  • A proprietary or custom TCP/UDP protocol with no public specification
  • Traffic Wireshark displays as raw Data bytes because no dissector matches
  • Game, IoT, industrial, or C2 protocols you must decode from captures plus the client binary
  • Building a Wireshark dissector, a Kaitai Struct spec, or a scapy layer to parse and replay a protocol

When NOT to Use

  • A known/structured protocol — Protobuf or gRPC specifically is attacking-grpc-protobuf; standard protocols have dissectors already.
  • Defensive PCAP investigation — hunting, IOC extraction, incident triage — is analyzing-network-traffic.
  • Reversing the client binary itself (disassembly, decompilation) is analyzing-binaries; do that in service of the protocol, then structure it here.
  • Identifying or breaking the crypto once you find the protocol is encrypted — reviewing-cryptography.

Work Both Sides

From the capture, establish structure by comparing many messages:

  • Framing — how a message knows where it ends: a length prefix (a field that tracks payload size across messages), a delimiter, or fixed-size records. Finding the length field is usually the first breakthrough.
  • Constants and magic — bytes identical across every message mark headers, version fields, or type tags.
  • Opcode / message type — a small field that correlates with different message shapes; group captures by it.
  • Counters and sequence numbers — fields that increment monotonically.
  • Checksums — a trailing field that changes unpredictably with the payload; test CRC variants against the message body.
  • TLV — many custom protocols are type-length-value triplets once you see the pattern.
  • Endianness — confirm from a known length: does a 260-byte message carry 04 01 or 01 04?

Read the full file on GitHub · 112 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 112 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A a796b4083597

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reversing-network-protocols is a skill published in the GitHub repository trilwu/secskills (137 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 1,310 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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