Many software languages (and programming languages, in particular) are described simultaneously by multiple grammars that are found in different software artifacts. For instance, one grammar may reside in a language specification; another grammar may be encoded in a parser specification; yet another grammar may be present in an XML schema for toolindependent data exchange. Ideally, one would wa...

The very first step for analyzing the security of an embedded device, without prior knowledge of the device’s construction, is analyzing the printed circuit board (PCB) of the device, in order to understand its electrical implementation. This analysis is called PCB reverse engineering and its results are a list of components, technical documentation related to those components, and a schematic ...

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...

Reverse engineering the brain will require a deep understanding of how information is represented and how computation is performed in the brain. What are the functional operations? What are the knowledge data structures? How are messages encoded? How are relationships established and broken? How are images processed? How does the brain transform signals into symbols? How does the brain generate...

A fundamental weakness of conventional reverse engineering approaches is the lack of support in identifying program structures and recurring patterns. The integration of human domain knowledge represented via patterns can significantly improve design recovery results. The recognition of a program’s design leads to recurring patterns that, at present, have to be identified in demanding tasks by ...

Nowadays a large majority of software systems are built using various technologies that in turn rely on different languages (e.g. Java, XML, SQL etc.). We call such systems heterogeneous applications (HAs). By contrast, we call software systems that are written in one language homogeneous applications. In HAs the information regarding the structure and the behaviour of the system is spread acro...

Whereas a design pattern describes and discusses a solution to a design problem, a reverse engineering pattern describes how to understand aspects of an object-oriented design and how to identify problems in that design. In the context of a project developing a methodology for reengineering objectoriented legacy systems into frameworks, we are working on a pattern language for reengineering. Th...

Binary tools such as disassemblers, just-in-time compilers, and executable code rewriters need to have an explicit representation of how machine instructions are encoded. Unfortunately, writing encodings for an entire instruction set by hand is both tedious and error-prone. We describe derive, a tool that extracts bit-level instruction encoding information from assemblers. The user provides der...

Query reverse engineering seeks to re-generate the SQL query that produced a given query output table from a given database. In this paper, we solve this problem for OLAP queries with group-by and aggregation. We develop a novel three-phase algorithm named REGAL 1 for this problem. First, based on a lattice graph structure, we identify a set of group-by candidates for the desired query. Second,...