Intelecommunications, aproprietary protocol is acommunications protocol owned by a single organization or individual.[1]
Ownership by a single organization gives the owner the ability to place restrictions on the use of the protocol and to change the protocol unilaterally. Specifications for proprietary protocols may or may not be published, and implementations arenot freely distributed. Proprietors may enforce restrictions through control of theintellectual property rights, for example, through enforcement ofpatent rights, and by keeping the protocol specification atrade secret. Some proprietary protocols strictly limit the right to create an implementation; others are widely implemented by entities that do not control the intellectual property, but subject to restrictions the owner of the intellectual property may seek to impose.
TheSkype protocol is a proprietary protocol.[2]
The Venturi Transport Protocol (VTP) is a patented proprietary protocol[3] that is designed to replaceTCP transparently in order to overcome perceived inefficiencies related to wireless data transport.
MicrosoftExchange Server protocols are proprietary[4] open access protocols. The rights to develop and release protocols are held by Microsoft, but all technical details are free for access and implementation.[5]
Microsoft developed a proprietary extension to theKerberos network authentication protocol for theWindows 2000operating system. The extensions made the protocol incompatible with implementations supporting the original standards, and this has raised concerns that this, along with the licensing restrictions, effectively denies products unable to conform to the standard access to a Windows 2000 Server using Kerberos.[6]
The use of proprietaryinstant messaging protocols meant that instant messaging networks were incompatible and people were unable to reach friends on other networks.[7]
Reverse engineering is the process of retrieving a protocol’s details from asoftware implementation of the specification. Methods of reverse-engineering a protocol includepacket sniffing and binarydecompilation anddisassembly.
There are legal precedents when the reverse-engineering is aimed at interoperability of protocols.[8][9][10] In theUnited States, theDigital Millennium Copyright Act grants asafe harbor to reverse engineer software for the purposes ofinteroperability with other software.[11][12]