Software Reverse Engineering

Abstract

Software Reverse Engineering (SRE) is the practice of analyzing a software system, either in whole or in part, to extract design and implementation information. A typical SRE scenario would involve a software module that has worked for years and carries several rules of a business in its lines of code. Unfortunately the source code of the application has been lost; what remains is “native” or “binary” code. Reverse engineering skills are also used to detect and neutralize viruses and malware, as well as to protect intellectual property. It became frighteningly apparent during the Y2K crisis that reverse engineering skills were not commonly held amongst programmers. Since that time, much research has been undertaken to formalize just what types of activities fall into the category of reverse engineering so that these skills could be taught to computer programmers and testers. To help address the lack of software reverse engineering education, several peer-reviewed articles on software reverse engineering, re-engineering, reuse, maintenance, evolution, and security were gathered with the objective of developing relevant, practical exercises for instructional purposes. The research revealed that SRE is fairly well described and most of the related activities fall into one of two categories: software development-related and security-related. Hands-on reverse engineering exercises were developed in the spirit of these two categories with the goal of providing a baseline education in reversing both Wintel machine code and Java bytecode.