The header and length of the payload are control data. It's still being concatenated even if it's binary. A common way to screw that one up is to measure the "length of payload" in two different ways, for example by using the return value of strlen or strnlen when setting the length of the payload but the return value of read(2) or std::string size() when sending/writing it or vice versa. If the data unexpectedly contains an interior NULL, or was expected to be NULL terminated and isn't, strnlen will return a different value than the amount of data read into the send buffer. Then the receiver may interpret user data after the interior NULL as the next header or, when they're reversed, interpret the next header as user data from the first message and user data from the next message as the next header.

Another fun one there is that if you copy data containing an interior NULL to a buffer using snprintf and only check the return value for errors but not an unexpectedly short length, it may have copied less data into the buffer than you expect. At which point sending the entire buffer will be sending uninitialized memory.

Likewise if the user data in a specific context is required to be a specific length, so you hard-code the "length of payload" for those messages without checking that the user data is actually the required length.

This is why it needs to be programmatic. You don't declare a struct with header fields and a payload length and then leave it for the user to fill them in, you make the same function copy N bytes of data into the payload buffer and increment the payload length field by N, and then make the payload buffer and length field both modifiable only via that function, and have the send/write function use the payload length from the header instead of taking it as an argument. Or take the length argument but then error out without writing the data if it doesn't match the one in the header.