Characterizing Reverse Engineering Practices on Decayed Software Applications

Software Reverse Engineering

This paper presents lessons learned from an experiment to reverse engineer a program. A reverse engineering process was used as part of a project to develop an Ada implementation of a Fortran program and upgrade the existing documentation. To accomplish this, design information was extracted from the Fortran source code and entered into a software development environment. The extracted design i...

Software Reverse Engineering Education

Software Reverse Engineering

While reverse engineering probably started with the analysis of hardware, today it plays a significant role in the software world. We discuss some of its uses and explain security related issues like malicious software and software piracy. It is shown how tools such as disassemblers and decompilers can help in this process, and why it is difficult to completely protect software from being rever...

Software reverse engineering

Introduction Reverse engineering aims at obtaining high level representations of programs. Reverse engineers typically start with a low level representation of a system (such as binaries, plain source code, or execution traces), and try to distill more abstract representations from these (such as, for the examples just given, source code, architectural views, or use cases, respectively). Revers...

Reverse Engineering Platform Independent Models from Business Software Applications

The reasons for reverse engineering software applications could be many. These include: to understand the design of the software system to improve it for future iterations, to communicate the design to others when prior documentation is either lost or does not exist or is out-dated, to understand competitors’ product to replicate the design, to understand the details to discover patent infringe...