CESH 430 Protocols: Abusing parsers, manipulating trust, and protocol states

About the course

This course turns protocol understanding into controlled exploitation. You examine the assumptions embedded systems make about who they are talking to, what state the conversation is in, and which messages should be accepted. The work covers provisioning, pairing, enrolment, session establishment, device identity, token handling, replay resistance and trust between devices, apps, gateways and cloud services. From there you build structured fuzzers and mutation harnesses that respect the target protocol’s framing, fields and state transitions, so you can attack parsers, validators, optional fields, nested structures and error handling without wasting effort on messages the device simply ignores. The goal is to find where trust, state and parsing logic break, then turn those failures into useful protocol-level effects.

Want to know what to expect in the classroom? Find out more about our training approach and how we turn technical concepts into practical, hands-on skills.

Venue and travel information

The classroom

The classroom is well appointed, has good WiFi and hot and cold drinks, it’s spacious, comfortable, has plenty of power sockets, lots of natural light, and is wheelchair friendly. The course is delivered in English and digital versions of slides and handouts will be provided where appropriate.

Food and refreshments

Lunch and morning and afternoon snacks are provided so please make sure you let us know about any dietary needs at least a week before we get started. With the exception of the social night, all other meals are for you to organise. We suggest getting a hotel that provides breakfast, and there are many good restaurants in Manchester for your evening meals. We will try and facilitate additional social arrangements, but, this is down to the individuals present.

Staying in Manchester

There are a number of good and affordable hotels in the Manchester area. We are based in an area called Media City and we are in the same complex as the northern headquarters of the BBC. This means that there are lots of facilities locally and you could choose to not venture into the city centre.

Getting here

If you do choose to look further around there are good tram links that can take you into the city as well as to key travel hubs such as Piccadilly, the national railway station, and Manchester International Airport.

Please check the weather before you travel and bring suitable clothes for the season. If in doubt, assume you will need a waterproof coat and an umbrella. The locals will tell you that Manchester is one of the rainiest places in the world, its not actually true but it does drizzle more than you might expect, even in summer.