Automatic proto files extraction

[Nithanim]

Based on the wiki page of Protobuf/How to reverse engineer the messages the proto files are reversed using AI and decompiled java bytecode (if that page is not outdated). Which sounded cumbersome and not so fun and stable to me.

Being a java dev and tinkerer, I looked into it and threw together a crude reverser. It is extremely shitty and was mostly generated with AI (because of my mobility issues) but the resulting proto files actually look quite ok-ish. I put them in a separate repository if anyone wants to take a look here: https://github.com/Nithanim/MammotionProto.
Currently, there does not seem to be real differences between the proto files here and the ones I extracted (except some minor additions and unused (?) enums).

I am still slowly working on making the code actually useable by someone else and adding a bit more automation.
So it might take some time until I publish it to github.
I do not have any other project to test it on but the extractor is built generically so it should actually work for "any" (simple) compiled proto java code.

Just wanted to throw it out there if anyone is interested.

Edit (bonus content): The way I do it is using ApkTool to convert it to smali files. Then I look for classes with the protobuf descriptor. Protobuf leaves a compiled version of the proto file in there, packed as protobuf itself. I use protobuf to parse that with its internal methods and iterate over the description object to generate a (more or less) valid proto file.

[mikey0000]

Hey thanks, when I started this project I was reversing them by hand, then AI came along and made it much easier.
The real fun now is keeping up with changes.
There should be a way to take the descriptor and classes and create the proto files from that. But even with ai and the java classes some types do not translate

E. G fixed64 vs int32 or even int64
So on top of this you'd need to run some tests against some encoded protobuf messages to validate them.

[Nithanim]

Just for your info, I updated the proto files in my repo (Nithanim/MammotionProto@c702a61) with the ones from the new app version.

[mikey0000]

Thanks, much changed?

[Nithanim]

There are only additions but I am not sure what they are for.

[Nithanim]

I updated my repo for pool robot stuff, but it reads also a bit generic, not sure: Nithanim/MammotionProto@8daaf5e

[mikey0000]

Don't think there is much going on there, looks like some updates towards the lidar version too.