A Survey of Software Reverse Engineering Applications

Abstract

With the development of software, software maintenance and software security become an important research of software engineering. Software reverse engineering plays an irreplaceable role in software maintenance and software security. In this paper, the applications of software reverse engineering in software maintenance and malware analysis, as well as the legitimacy of software reverse engineering research are briefly discussed, and then software reverse engineering, disassembly, decompilation and so on are introduced. Related technique such as software protection technology, static analysis technology, dynamic analysis technology are described. Then, we discuss the application of software reverse engineering, such as software maintenance, software vulnerability mining, malware analysis and so on. In addition, we also describe how to use software reverse engineering to learn the method of software cracking, so as to resist reverse attack and improve the ability of anti-piracy of software itself.