“Reverse engineering is the process of extracting the knowledge or design blueprints from anything man-made. Reverse engineering is usually conducted to obtain missing knowledge, ideas, and design philosophy when such information is unavailable. In some cases, the information is owned by someone who isn't willing to share them. In other cases, the information has been lost or destroyed” (Eilam, 2005).
The advantages and disadvantages of reverse engineering are as follows;
Advantages
* It helps in the evolving of existing computing systems.
* “You can change a program's structure and thus directly affect its logical flow. Technically this activity is called patching, because it involves placing new code patches (in a seamless manner) over the original code” (Hoglund & McGraw, 2004).
* As a learning tool
* As a way to make new compatible products that are cheaper than what's currently on the market.
(Schwartz, 2001)
* For making software interoperate more effectively or to bridge different operating systems or databases.
* To uncover the uncoordinated features of commercial products.
Disadvantages
* “Manually translated source code often retains the style and flavour of the original implementation”.
(Byrne, 1991)
* “The most commonly recognized problem with literal translation is summed up as: garbage in, garbage out. If the existing system is not well-structured, both in terms of its architecture and control-flow, then the resulting system will be of the same poor quality. Automatically generated code may be terribly inefficient. The code produced by translation may also be difficult to understand, greatly increasing its future maintenance costs”.
The reverse engineering tool that I found is called “WindowsSCOPE Cyber Forensics-Pro”, the list of features that it can do is as follows:
1. reverse engineering
2. cyber defense
3. cyber-attack