Decoding data to type without .proto files, with --decode_raw
The final flag that I want to present here is --decode_raw. Now, before even getting to why we would want this flag, it is important to recognize the constraints of --encode and --decode. There are two of them.
The first one is that we need to know which type the data needs to be serialized into or was serialized into. In situations where you trying to reverse engineer a solution or where you do not have much documentation, it is effectively impossible to use these two flags.
An example might be useful. Let us say that you find a file called an_app.preferences_pb on your Android phone (by the way, this is a real thing; check https://developer.android.com/codelabs/android-proto-datastore). You are not the developer of “an_app” but you still want to inspect the file and make sure that it is not storing sensitive information in “plain text.” Now, you read this book, and you are thinking that...
