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Closed Source Reverse Engineering

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voidmain:
Reverse engineering is allowed to an extent. I would have to do some research so don't take what I say as fact but I believe it to be so. I believe that you are allowed to reverse engineer closed source software that do not document their protocols and interfaces so as to make your software work/communicate with said closed source software.

That is what allows Samba to exist and allows it to communicate with Windows on many levels. However, I believe with Samba most of the reverse engineering is done to the protocol and not necessarily the Windows software itself. That is, network sniffers come in handy to figure out what the closed source software is doing. Again, this is from memory of reading several articles and discussions about it, and if I recall there have been court rulings on such activity to support it.

Someone please correct me if/where I am wrong on this.

lazygamer:
Just how possible is it to reverse engineer? Do you just put binary code into a program that turns it into incomplete sourcecode?

flap:
Getting from binary code to high level source code is known as decompilation, and is not easy. There are some decompilers available but I have no idea how well they work. The problem with decompiling code is that high level code -> machine code is not a simple 1:1 translation. That is, one particular piece of object code could be produced from any number of pieces of high level code, so the translation back is ambiguous.

Disassembling, on the other hand (translation from machine code to assembly code) *is* a simple 1:1 translation so is more reliable/easy. But it's obviously harder to get useful information about a program's workings from assembler than it is from C/C++ etc.

choasforages:
and for legal issues involving coding, after seeing an asm dump, you are no longer a "virgin" and you could comprimise the licensing of an opensource project. now with the attack shark spray used, what are trying to take apart?

Kintaro:
Its not about law, but weather you are going to get caught or not.

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