What is Reverse Engineering?

Throughout the history of invention curious minds have sought to understand the inner workings of their gadgets. Whether investigating a broken watch, or improving an engine, these people have broken down their goods into their elemental parts to understand how they work. This is Reverse Engineering (RE), and it is done every day from recreating outdated and incompatible software, understanding malicious code, or exploiting weaknesses in software.

Software reverse engineering is done to retrieve the source code of a program because the source code was lost, to study how the program performs certain operations, to improve the performance of a program, to fix a bug (correct an error in the program when the source code is not available), to identify malicious content in a program such as a virus or to adapt a program written for use with one microprocessor for use with another. Reverse engineering for the purpose of copying or duplicating programs may constitute a copyright violation. In some cases, the licensed use of software specifically prohibits reverse engineering.

Hardware Reverse Engineering

Hardware reverse engineering involves taking apart a device to see how it works. For example, if a processor manufacturer wants to see how a competitor's processor works, they can purchase a competitor's processor, disassemble it, and then make a processor similar to it. However, this process is illegal in many countries. In general, hardware reverse engineering requires a great deal of expertise and is quite expensive.

Tools Used In Reverse Engineering

There are lots of tools on the market. Toad from Quest and Quest's new Knowledge Base tools (previously from RevealNet) will reverse engineer the database for you. And there are other tools as well like Oracle Designer, etc. So they are out there, but they will cost money.

If you are using Oracle 9i, then you can look at the DBMS_METADATA package. This package will reverse engineer any database object for you.

Another free avenue is the export file of the database. You've already mentioned the INDEXFILE option, but the SHOW option also works. Both are a little "messy" though.

And you can search the WWW for many, many scripts out there to do this as well.

Reverse Engineering For Mobile Apps

Reverse engineering applications help penetration testers understand how the application works and discover weaknesses that can be used by Hackers in a real-world attack. It’s also used to find hidden malware in the underlying code. For example, enterprises that are risk averse may decide to set up their own mobile app store, giving employees approved applications that have been vetted and whitelisted for use on their smartphone or tablet devices.

Written by Ayush Tyagi

I am Ayush Tyagi, A Blogger who is living a dot com lifestyle by exploring new ways to make money on the internet. I am always enthusiastic to share everything that can help you to make money on the internet and build your own dot com lifestyle.