SA107: Introduction to Protocol Analysis

SA107: Introduction to Protocol Analysis introduces students to the systematic examination of communication protocols that govern how data is structured, transmitted, and interpreted across digital networks. This course focuses on understanding protocol behavior as an extension of signal, binary, and communications analysis, emphasizing how structured rules and conventions transform raw data into meaningful exchanges.
 
Building on prior coursework in communications analysis, students learn how protocols define message formats, control flow, addressing, error handling, and session management. The course explores both standardized and proprietary protocols, highlighting how design choices influence data visibility, reliability, and analytic complexity. Students are taught to recognize protocol patterns even when formal documentation is unavailable.
 
Through hands-on analysis and guided exercises, learners practice identifying protocol boundaries, extracting headers and fields, and correlating packet sequences into higher-level transactions. Emphasis is placed on developing a disciplined analytic methodology—forming hypotheses, validating structure through repetition, and distinguishing protocol logic from noise or transport artifacts.
 
By the end of SA107, students will be able to approach unfamiliar data streams, determine whether protocol behavior is present, reconstruct message structures, and prepare extracted data for deeper exploitation, reverse engineering, or automation in advanced Digital Atlas protocol analysis courses.