Reverse Engineering

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Aspects To Be Covered

• Introduction to reverse engineering.

• Comparison between reverse and forward
engineering.
• Reverse engineering process.
• Approaches for reverse engineering.
• Other areas of application.
• Legal issues.
•

• Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Introduction

• What is Reverse Engineering ?

 The process of analyzing a system to
1 identify the system's components and their inter-relationships and
2 to create representation of the system in another form.
3
• Also called as “going backwards through development cycle.”
•


Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Objectives
1.Re-documentation
 A process to derive the design or speciation of a system from its source
code.

2.Design Recovery
 Design recovery aims at recreating design abstractions from the source
code, existing documentation, experts' knowledge and any other source of
information.

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Reverse v/s forward engineering

Requirements

Analysis
Forward Reverse
engineering engineering

Design

Implementation

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Reverse Engineering Process

1. Information Extraction
2. Abstraction

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Use Of Reverse Engineering

• Transforming obsolete products into useful ones by adapting them to new
systems and platforms.

• Some features of the system needs to be refined out.

• It can be use if there is no adequate documentation of the

original design.

• Investigating and correcting errors and limitations in

existing programs.
• Studying the design principles of a product as part of an
education in engineering.
• Understanding how a product works.
Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal
 Reverse Engineering

Approaches To Reverse Engineering

• White Box Analysis
•
• Black Box Analysis
•
• Gray Box Analysis


Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

White Box Analysis

• Involves analysis of source code.


• For e.g. decompiling a binary code to get the source code

is a kind of white box analysis.
•
• Effective for finding programming and implementation
errors in software.
•

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Black Box Analysis

• Black box analysis refers to analyzing a running
program by probing it with various inputs.
•
• This can be used to test for the security issues of the
system.

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Gray Box Analysis

• Gray box analysis combines white box techniques
with black box input testing.
•
• A good example of a simple gray box analysis is
running a target program within a debugger and
then supplying particular sets of inputs to the
program.

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Code Reverse Engineering

• Reverse engineering focuses at reverse engineering at
code level.

• For reverse engineering code is a reliable source of

information.

• Limitation : the code does not contain all the

information that is needed.

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Data Reverse Engineering

• Data reverse engineering tackles the question of what information is
stored and how this information can be used.

• Data reverse engineering techniques can also be used to assess the

overall quality of software systems.

• Consists of 2 main activities :

1. Data Analysis

2. Conceptual Abstraction

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Data Analysis
• The analysis activity aims to recover an up-to-date
logical data model that is structurally complete and
semantically annotated.
• Computer-aided reverse engineering tools can be
used for data analysis.

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Conceptual Abstraction
• Conceptual abstraction aims to map the logical data model derived
from data analysis to an equivalent conceptual design.
• ER-Diagrams or Object Oriented data models can be used to
represent the design.
• Several tools support data abstraction but has following limitations :
1. Iteration
2. Bidirectional Mapping Process
3. Research Direction

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering can also be used for

• Military applications
•
• Mechanical Devices

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 Reverse Engineering

Legal Issues
• Reverse engineering has been held a legitimate form of
discovery.
• The law regarding reverse engineering in the computer
software and hardware context is less clear due to :
1. Anti reverse engineering licensing provisions.
2. Prohibition on the circumvention of technologies
embedded within protection measures.
•

Dept. of I&CT, MIT, Manipal

 References

[1]
 P. Aiken. Data Reverse Engineering: Slaying
the Legacy Dragon. McGraw- Hill.

[2]
 http://www.jenkins.eu/articles/reverse-

engineering.asp

[3]
 http

://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReverseEngineering

[4]
 http://www.chillingeects.org/reverse/faq.cgi
THANK YOU