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roducts 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the discovery of the design principles behind a product especially if this design information is not easily available outdated pcbs are often subject to reverse engineering especially when they perform highly critical functions such as powering machinery or other electronic components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 such as business process extraction although efforts to represent language constructs can be never ending because of the number of languages the continuous evolution of software languages and the development of new languages the standard does allow for the use of extensions to support the broad language set as well as evolution kdm is compatible with uml bpmn rdf and other standards enabling migration into other environments and thus leverage system knowledge for efforts such as software system transformation and enterprise business layer analysis protocols edit protocols are sets of rules that describe message formats and how messages are exchanged the protocol state machine accordingly the problem of protocol reverse engineering can be partitioned into two subproblems message format and state machine reverse engineering the message formats have traditionally been reverse engineered by a tedious manual process which involved analysis of how protocol implementations process messages but recent research proposed a number of automatic solutions 26 27 28 typically the automatic approaches group observe messages into clusters by using various clustering analyses or they emulate the protocol implementation tracing the message processing there has been less work on reverse engineering of state machines of protocols in general the protocol state machines can be learned either through a process of offline learning which passively observes communication and attempts to build the most general state machine accepting all observed sequences of messages and online learning which allows interactive generation of probing sequences of messages and listening to responses to those probing sequences in general offline learning of small state machines is known to be np complete 29 but online learning can be done in polynomial time 30 an automatic offline approach has been demonstrated by comparetti et al 28 and an online approach by cho et al 31 other components of typical protocols like encryption and hash functions can be reverse engineered automatically as well typically the automatic approaches trace the execution of protocol implementations and try to detect buffers in memory holding unencrypted packets 32 integrated circuits smart cards edit reverse engineering is an invasive and destructive form of analyzing a smart card the attacker uses chemicals to etch away layer after layer of the smart card and takes pictures with a scanning electron microscope sem that technique can reveal the complete hardware and software part of the smart card the major problem for the attacker is to bring everything into the right order to find out how everything works the makers of the card try to hide keys and operations by mixing up memory positions such as by bus scrambling 33 34 in some cases it is even possible to attach a probe to measure voltages while the smart card is still operational the makers of the card employ sensors to detect and prevent that attack 35 that attack is not very common because it requires both a large investment in effort and special equipment that is generally available only to large chip manufacturers furthermore the payoff from this attack is low since other security techniques are often used such as shadow accounts it is still uncertain whether attacks against chip and pin cards to replicate encryption data and then to crack pins would provide a cost effective attack on multifactor authentication full reverse engineering proceeds in several major steps the first step after images have been taken with a sem is stitching the images together which is necessary because each layer cannot be captured by a single shot a sem needs to sweep across the area of the circuit and take several hundred images to cover the entire layer image stitching takes as input several hundred pictures and outputs a single properly overlapped picture of the complete layer next the stitched layers need to be aligned because the sample after etching cannot be put into the exact same position relative to the sem each time therefore the stitched versions will not overlap in the correct fashion as on the real circuit usually three corresponding points are selected and a transformation applied on the basis of that to extract the circuit structure the aligned stitched images need to be segmented which highlights the important circuitry and separates it from the uninteresting background and insulating materials finally the wires can be traced from one layer to the next and the netlist of the circuit which contains all of the circuit s information can be reconstructed military applications edit this section needs more citations please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources unsourced material may be challenged and removed july 2014 learn how and when to remove this message reverse engineering is often used by people to copy other nations technologies devices or information that have been obtained by regular troops in the fields or by intelligence operations it was often used during the second world war and the cold war following are some well known examples from the second world war and afterward jerry can british and american forces in ww2 noticed that the germans had gasoline cans with an excellent design they reverse engineered copies of those cans ...
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