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intended to be used or revealing how a competitor s product was built 12 that process is commonly used for cracking software and media to remove their copy protection 12 7 or to create a possibly improved copy or even a knockoff which is usually the goal of a competitor or a hacker 12 8 malware developers often use reverse engineering techniques to find vulnerabilities in an operating system to build a computer virus that can exploit the system vulnerabilities 12 5 reverse engineering is also being used in cryptanalysis to find vulnerabilities in substitution cipher symmetric key algorithm or public key cryptography 12 6 there are other uses to reverse engineering games reverse engineering in the context of games and game engines is often used to understand underlying mechanics data structures and proprietary protocols allowing developers to create mods custom tools or to enhance compatibility this practice is particularly useful when interfacing with existing systems to improve interoperability between different game components engines or platforms platforms like reshax 13 provide tools and resources that assist in analyzing game binaries dissecting game engine behavior thus contributing to a deeper understanding of game technology and enabling community driven enhancements interfacing reverse engineering can be used when a system is required to interface to another system and how both systems would negotiate is to be established such requirements typically exist for interoperability military or commercial espionage learning about an enemy s or competitor s latest research by stealing or capturing a prototype and dismantling it may result in the development of a similar product or a better countermeasure against it obsolescence integrated circuits are often designed on proprietary systems and built on production lines which become obsolete in only a few years when systems using those parts can no longer be maintained since the parts are no longer made the only way to incorporate the functionality into new technology is to reverse engineer the existing chip and then to redesign it using newer tools by using the understanding gained as a guide another obsolescence originated problem that can be solved by reverse engineering is the need to support maintenance and supply for continuous operation existing legacy devices that are no longer supported by their original equipment manufacturer the problem is particularly critical in military operations product security analysis that examines how a product works by determining the specifications of its components and estimate costs and identifies potential patent infringement also part of product security analysis is acquiring sensitive data by disassembling and analyzing the design of a system component 14 another intent may be to remove copy protection or to circumvent access restrictions competitive technical intelligence that is to understand what one s competitor is actually doing rather than what it says that it is doing saving money finding out what a piece of electronics can do may spare a user from purchasing a separate product repurposing obsolete objects are then reused in a different but useful manner design production and design companies applied reverse engineering to practical craft based manufacturing process the companies can work on historical manufacturing collections through 3d scanning 3d re modeling and re design in 2013 italian manufacturers baldi and savio firmino together with university of florence optimized their innovation design and production processes 15 common uses edit machines edit as computer aided design cad has become more popular reverse engineering has become a viable method to create a 3d virtual model of an existing physical part for use in 3d cad cam cae or other software 16 the reverse engineering process involves measuring an object and then reconstructing it as a 3d model the physical object can be measured using 3d scanning technologies like cmms laser scanners structured light digitizers or industrial ct scanning computed tomography the measured data alone usually represented as a point cloud lacks topological information and design intent the former may be recovered by converting the point cloud to a triangular faced mesh reverse engineering aims to go beyond producing such a mesh and to recover the design intent in terms of simple analytical surfaces where appropriate planes cylinders etc as well as possibly nurbs surfaces to produce a boundary representation cad model recovery of such a model allows a design to be modified to meet new requirements a manufacturing plan to be generated etc hybrid modeling is a commonly used term when nurbs and parametric modeling are implemented together using a combination of geometric and freeform surfaces can provide a powerful method of 3d modeling areas of freeform data can be combined with exact geometric surfaces to create a hybrid model a typical example of this would be the reverse engineering of a cylinder head which includes freeform cast features such as water jackets and high tolerance machined areas 17 reverse engineering is also used by businesses to bring existing physical geometry into digital product development environments to make a digital 3d record of their own products or to assess competitors products it is used to analyze how a product works what it does what components it has estimate costs identify potential patent infringement etc value engineering a related activity that is also used by businesses involves deconstructing and analyzing products however the objective is to find opportunities for cost cutting printed circuit boards edit main article pcb reverse engineering reverse engineering of printed circuit boards involves recreating fabrication data for a particular circuit board this is done primarily to identify a design and learn the functional and structural characteristics of a design it also allows for the discovery of the design principles behind a product especially if this design information is not easily available outdated pcbs are often subject to reverse engineering especially when they perform highly critical functions such as powering machinery or other electronic components reverse engineering these old parts can allow the reconstruction of the pcb if it performs some crucial task as well as finding alternatives which provide the same function or in upgrading the old pcb 18 reverse engineering pcbs largely follow the same series of steps first images are created by drawing scanning or taking photographs of the pcb then these images are ported to suitable reverse engineering software in order to create a rudimentary design for the new pcb the quality of these images that is necessary for suitable reverse engineering is proportional to the complexity of the pcb itself more complicated pcbs require well lighted photos on dark backgrounds while fairly simple pcbs can be recreated simply with just basic dimensioning each layer of the pcb is carefully recreated in the software with the intent of producing a final design as close to the initial then the schematics for the circuit are finally generated using an appropriate tool 19 software edit in 1990 the institute of electrical and electronics engineers ieee defined software reverse engineering sre as the process of analyzing a subject system to identify the system s components and their interrelationships and to create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of abstraction in which the subject system is the end product of software development reverse engineering is a process of examination only and the software system under consideration is not modified which would otherwise be re engineering or restructuring reverse engineering can be performed from any stage of the product cycle not necessarily from the functional end product 11 there are two components in reverse engineering redocumentation and design recovery redocumentation is the creation of new representation of the computer code so that it is easier to understand meanwhile design recovery is the use of deduction or reasoning from general knowledge or personal experience of the product to understand the product s functionality fully 11 it can also be seen as going backwards through the development cycle 20 in this model the output of the implementation phase in source code form is reverse engineered back to the analysis phase in an inversion of the traditional waterfall model another term for this technique is program comprehension 8 the working conference on reverse engineering wcre has been held yearly to explore and expand the techniques of reverse engineering 12 21 computer aided software engineering case and automated code generation have contributed greatly in the field of reverse engineering 12 software anti tamper technology like obfuscation is used to deter both reverse engineering and re engineering of proprietary software and software powered systems in practice two main types of reverse engineering emerge in the first case source code is already available for the software but higher level aspects of the program which are perhaps poorly documented or documented but no longer valid are discovered in the second case there is no source code available for the software and any efforts towards discovering one possible source code for the software are regarded as reverse engineering the second usage of the term is more familiar to most people reverse engineering of software can make use of the clean room design technique to avoid copyright infringement on a related note black box testing in software engineering has a lot in common with reverse engineering the tester usually has the api but has the goals to find bugs and undocumented features by bashing the product from outside 22 other purposes of reverse engineering include security auditing removal of copy protection cracking circumvention of access restrictions often present in consumer electronics customization of embedded systems such as engine management systems in house repairs or retrofits enabling of additional features on low cost crippled hardware such as some graphics card chip sets or even mere satisfaction of curiosity binary software edit binary reverse engineering is performed if source code for a software is unavailable 12 this process is sometimes termed reverse code engineering or rce 23 for example decompilation of binaries for the java platform can be accomplished by using jad one famous case of reverse engineering was the first non ibm implementation of the pc bios which launched the historic ibm pc compatible industry that has been the overwhelmingly dominant computer hardware platform for many years reverse engineering of software is protected in the us by the fair use exception in copyright law 24 the samba software which allows systems that do not run microsoft windows systems to share files with systems that run it is a classic example of software reverse engineering 25 since the samba project had to reverse engineer unpublished information about how windows file sharing worked so that non windows computers could emulate it the wine project does the same thing for the windows api and openoffice org is one party doing that for the microsoft office file formats the reactos project is even more ambitious in its goals by striving to provide binary abi and api compatibility with the current windows operating systems of the nt branch which allows software and drivers written for windows to run on a clean room reverse engineered free software gpl counterpart binary software techniques edit reverse engineering of software can be accomplished by various methods the three main groups of software reverse engineering are analysis through observation of information exchange most prevalent in protocol reverse engineering which involves using bus analyzers and packet sniffers such as for accessing a computer bus or computer network connection and revealing the traffic data thereon bus or network behavior can then be analyzed to produce a standalone implementation that mimics that behavior that is especially useful for reverse engineering device drivers sometimes reverse engineering on embedded systems is greatly assisted by tools deliberately introduced by the manufacturer such as jtag ports or other debugging means in microsoft windows low level debuggers such as softice are popular disassembly using a disassembler meaning the raw machine language of the program is read and understood in its own terms only with the aid of machine language mnemonics it works on any computer program but can take quite some time especially for those who are not used to machine code the interactive disassembler is a particularly popular tool decompilation using a decompiler a process that tries with varying results to recreate the source code in some high level language for a program only available in machine code or bytecode software classification edit software classification is the process of identifying similarities between different software binaries such as two different versions of the same binary used to detect code relations between software samples the task was traditionally done manually for several reasons such as patch analysis for vulnerability detection and copyright infringement but it can now be done somewhat automatically for large numbers of samples this method is being used mostly for long and thorough reverse engineering tasks complete analysis of a complex algorithm or big piece of software in general statistical classification is considered to be a hard problem which is also true for software classification and so few solutions tools that handle this task well source code edit a number of uml tools refer to the process of importing and analysing source code to generate uml diagrams as reverse engineering see list of unified modeling language tools although uml is one approach in providing reverse engineering more recent advances in international standards activities have resulted in the development of the knowledge discovery metamodel kdm the standard delivers an ontology for the intermediate or abstracted representation of programming language constructs and their interrelationships an object management group standard on its way to becoming an iso standard as well citation needed kdm has started to take hold in industry with the development of tools and analysis environments that can deliver the extraction and analysis of source binary and byte code for source code analysis kdm s granular standards architecture enables the extraction of software system flows data control and call maps architectures and business layer knowledge rules terms and process the standard enables the use of a common data format xmi enabling the correlation of the various layers of system knowledge for either detailed analysis such as root cause impact or derived analysis ...
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