Welcome to PRE Workbench Docs
PRE Workbench is a software that supports reverse engineers in analyzing proprietary binary protocols, using a custom-built HEX viewer for binary data and a specialized description language for binary protocol structures. Our software supports verifying the documented structure with fast round-trip times as well as generating Wireshark dissectors as output.
Features
Data import
- Load PCAP files
- Load binary files, single or a complete folder as package list
- Load CSV files, using one column as payload (hex/base64 encoded) and the rest as metadata
Interactive Hexdump
Heuristics
- Recognize length fields
- highlight matching length fields for selection
- Evaluate selection as length field
- Highlight same content
Annotations
- color and text highlighting of byte sequences
- Application of the annotations to further packages
Interactive documentation of procotol structure as grammar
- Description language for binary protocols
- "Click-Grammar": Edit in parallel using code and GUI (see screencast below)
- Applying a grammar to multiple packages
- Display of fields from grammar in table
PRE Workbench (Click-Grammar)
Data inspector
Parse the selection as different data types (Signed/Unsigned Int, Big/Little Endian, ...).
Search function and execution of external tools
Search one or multiple buffers for a regular expression, e.g. find all ASCII strings 5 byte or longer.
Project folder
Preferences, widget layout, open files and grammars are stored per project.
Plugin and macro support
Macros can be added at user-level (~/.config) and at project level (.pre_workbench), and some example macros are bundled with the application -- to use macros, click "View" > "Tool Windows" > "Macros". To enable plugin support, configure a plugin directory in the settings dialog. More information in the Plugins and Macros documentation and in the release notes. You can find some example plugins on Github.