LLMs Unleashed: Generating Protocol Code from RFC Specifications

Abstract

RFC (Request for Comments) documents constitute the foundation of network protocol standardization. However, they are expressed in natural language, they tend to be lengthy and ambiguous, forcing protocol implementers to rely on extensive manual parsing and coding—a process that is both labor-intensive and prone to errors. This makes the automated parsing and comprehension of RFC documents a major challenge in network protocol research. To address this gap, we introduce large language models (LLMs) into the task of automatic network protocol code generation from RFC documents (RFC2Code) and propose a comprehensive evaluation framework to quantitatively assess LLM performance. We develop an end-to-end automated protocol generation system, APG (Automated Protocol-Generation), which supports implementations of ICMP, IGMP, NTP, and TCP. Compared to prior NLP (Natural language processing) methods, APG achieves a fully automated workflow with approximately 3.17× faster processing, 95% compile success and behavioral correctness for stateless protocols like ICMP, and 90% interoperability for complex stateful protocols such as TCP, requiring only minimal manual intervention.