In industrial automation, the ability to analyze and troubleshoot proprietary communication protocols is critical for ensuring system reliability and efficiency. This thesis addresses the lack of protocol analysis tooling for ABB’s proprietary Inter-Application Communication (IAC) protocol, which is used within the ABB Ability System 800xA. As Wireshark, a widely adopted network packet analysis tool, does not offer native support for the IAC protocol, manual interpretation of raw UDP data has previously been required, leading to inefficiencies and increased risk of human error. 

This work presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a custom Wireshark dissector written in Lua, capable of parsing and visualizing IAC traffic. The project followed the Design Science Research Methodology by Peffers et al., including iterative prototyping, testing with real-world network captures and interviews with protocol developers, engineers and customer support personnel at ABB. The artifact was developed under the constraints of lacking public documentation, relying only on partial internal documentation and required significant reverse engineering of source code with expert guidance. 

The results demonstrate that even proprietary, partially documented protocols can be effectively supported with Wireshark through hands-on experimentation, iterative prototyping, reverse engineering efforts, expert feedback and collaborative development practices. The dissector significantly improved IAC traffic analysis by making packet content more accessible, reducing analysis time and minimizing errors. In addition to its practical value for ABB, the thesis contributes generalizable strategies and knowledge for developing protocol dissectors under similar industrial conditions.