Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a human made device, object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation.
Reverse engineering often involves taking something (e.g., a mechanical device, electronic component, or software program) apart and analyzing its workings in detail to be used in maintenance, or to try to make a new device or program that does the same thing without using or simply duplicating (without understanding) any part of the original.
Reverse engineering has its origins in the analysis of hardware for commercial or military advantage. The purpose is to deduce design decisions from end products with little or no additional knowledge about the procedures involved in the original production. The same techniques are subsequently being researched for application to legacy software systems, not for industrial or defense ends, but rather to replace incorrect, incomplete, or otherwise unavailable documentation.
Reverse engineering techniques of Software consist of decompiling, analyzing, hooking, and patching.
See also:
- Tracing a NCR assembly program of MASM walk-through of manually tracing and commenting a simple recursive function ing 16-bit x86 asm source to C-like pseudocode. With discussion of how to analyse and what to look for in finding the data flow.
