Protoscope

Protobuf + Rotoscope

Protoscope is a simple, human-editable language for representing and emitting the Protobuf wire format. It is inspired by, and is significantly based on, DER ASCII, a similar tool for working with DER and BER, wire formats of ASN.1.

Unlike most Protobuf tools, it is normally ignorant of schemata specified in .proto files; it has just enough knowledge of the wire format to provide primitives for constructing messages (such as field tags, varints, and length prefixes). A disassembler is included that uses heuristics to try convert encoded Protobuf into Protoscope, although the heuristics are necessarily imperfect.

We provide the Go package github.com/protocolbuffers/protoscope, as well as the protoscope tool, which can be installed with the Go tool via

go install github.com/protocolbuffers/protoscope/cmd/protoscope...@latest

go install will place the binary in the GOBIN directory, which is ~/go/bin by default. See the docs for go install for more details.

For the language specification and basic examples, see language.txt. Example disassembly can be found under ./testdata.

Cookbook

Protoscope can be used in a number of different ways to inspect or create binary Protobuf data. This isn't the full breadth of usecases, but they are the ones Protoscope (and its ancestor, DER ASCII) were designed for.

Exploring Binary Dumps

Sometimes, while working on a library that emits wire format, it may be necessary to debug the precise output of a test failure. If your test prints out a hex string, you can use the xxd command to turn it into raw binary data and pipe it into protoscope.

Consider the following example of a message with a google.protobuf.Any field:

$ cat hexdata.txt
0a400a26747970652e676f6f676c65617069732e636f6d2f70726f746f332e546573744d65737361676512161005420e65787065637465645f76616c756500000000
$ xxd -r -ps hexdata.txt | protoscope
1: {
  1: {"type.googleapis.com/proto3.TestMessage"}
  2: {`1005420e65787065637465645f76616c756500000000`}
}
$ xxd -r -ps <<< "1005420e65787065637465645f76616c756500000000" | protoscope
2: 5
8: {"expected_value"}
`00000000`

This reveals that four zero bytes sneaked into the output!

If your test failure output is made up of C-style escapes and text, the printf command can be used instead of xxd:

$ printf '\x10\x05B\x0eexpected_value\x00\x00\x00\x00' | protoscope
2: 5
8: {"expected_value"}
`00000000`

The protoscope command has many flags for refining the heuristic used to decode the binary.

If an encoded FileDescriptorSet proto is available that contains your message's type, you can use it to get schema-aware decoding:

$ cat hexdata.txt
086510661867206828d20130d4013d6b000000416c000000000000004d6d000000516e000000000000005d0000de42610000000000005c40680172033131357a0331313683018801758401
$ xxd -r -ps hexdata.txt | protoscope \
  -descriptor-set path/to/fds.pb -message-type unittest.TestAllTypes \
  -print-field-names
1: 101        # optional_int32
2: 102        # optional_int64
3: 103        # optional_uint32
4: 104        # optional_uint64
5: 105z       # optional_sint32
6: 106z       # optional_sint64
7: 107i32     # optional_fixed32
8: 108i64     # optional_fixed64
9: 109i32     # optional_sfixed32
10: 110i64    # optional_sfixed64
11: 111.0i32  # optional_float, 0x42de0000i32
12: 112.0     # optional_double, 0x405c000000000000i64
13: true      # optional_bool
14: {"115"}   # optional_string
15: {"116"}   # optional_bytes
16: !{        # optionalgroup
  17: 117     # a
}

You can get an encoded FileDescriptorSet by invoking

protoc -Ipath/to/imported/protos -o my_fds.pb my_proto.proto

Modifying Existing Files

Suppose that we have a proto file foo.bin of unknown schema:

$ protoscope foo.bin
1: 42
2: {
  42: {"my awesome proto"}
}

Modifying the embedded string with a hex editor is very painful, because it's possible that the length prefix needs to be updated, which can lead to the length prefix on outer messages needing to be changed as well. This is made worse by length prefixes being varints, which may grow or shrink and feed into further outer length prefix updates.

But protoscope makes this into a simple disassemble, edit, assembly loop:

$ xxd foo.bin
00000000: 082a 1213 d202 106d 7920 6177 6573 6f6d  .*.....my awesom
00000010: 6520 7072 6f74 6f                        e proto

$ protoscope foo.bin > foo.txt  # Disassemble.
$ cat foo.txt
1: 42
2: {
  42: {"my awesome proto"}
}

$ vim foo.txt  # Make some edits.
$ cat foo.txt
1: 43
2: {
  42: {"my even more awesome awesome proto"}
}

$ protoscope -s foo.txt > foo.bin  # Reassemble.
$ xxd foo.bin
00000000: 082b 1225 d202 226d 7920 6576 656e 206d  .+.%.."my even m
00000010: 6f72 6520 6177 6573 6f6d 6520 6177 6573  ore awesome awes
00000020: 6f6d 6520 7072 6f74 6f                   ome proto

The -message-type option from above can be used when you know the schema to make it easier to find specific fields.

Describing Invalid Binaries

Because Protoscope has a very weak understanding of Protobuf, it can be used to create invalid encodings to verify that some invariant is actually checked by a production parser.

For example, the following Protoscope text can be used to create a test that ensures a too-long length prefix is rejected as invalid.

1: {
  2:LEN 5   # Explicit length prefix.
    "oops"  # One byte too short.
}

This is more conveinent than typing out bytes by hand, because Protoscope takes care of tedious details like length prefixes, varint encoding, float encoding, and other things not relevant to the test. It also permits comments, which can be used to specify why the Protoscope snippet produces a broken binary.

Protoscope itself generates test data using Protoscope, which is then checked in. Other projects can either check in binary data directly, or use the build system to invoke protoscope, such as with a Bazel genrule().

Backwards Compatibility

The Protoscope language itself may be extended over time, but the intention is for extensions to be backwards-compatible. Specifically:

The command-line interface to protoscope will remain compatible, though new options may be added in the future.
Previously valid Protoscope will remain valid and produce the same output. In particular, checking in test data as Protoscope text should be future-proof.
Previously invalid Protoscope may become valid in the future if the language is extended.
Disassembly is necessarily a heuristic, so its output may change over time, but it is guaranteed to produce Protoscope output that will reassemble to the original byte string. protoscope | protoscope -s is always equivalent to cat.

Disclaimer

This is not an official Google project.