Reverse Engineering

Engineering is many times described as making practical application of the knowledge of pure sciences in the solution of a problem or the application of scientific and mathematical principles to develop economical solutions to technical problems, creating products, facilities, and structures that are useful to people. What if the opposite occurs? There is some product that may be a solution to some problem but the inner workings of the solution or even the problem it addresses may be unknown. Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing and understanding a product which functioning and purpose are unknown. In Computer Science in particular, reverse engineering may be defined as the process of analyzing a system's code, documentation, and behavior to identify its current components and their dependencies to extract and create system abstractions and design information. The subject system is not altered; however, additional knowledge about the system is produced. The definition of Reverse Engineering is not peaceful though, especially when it concerns to court and lawsuits. The Reverse Engineering of products protected by copyrighting may be a crime, even if no code is copied. From the software companies’ point of view, Reverse Engineering is many times defined as “Analyzing a product or other output of a process in order to determine how to duplicate the know-how which has been used to create a product or process”.