This document discusses software reverse engineering. It defines reverse engineering as extracting knowledge or design information from a man-made system to recreate it at a higher level of abstraction. For software, reverse engineering analyzes a system to understand its design and implementation. It is used to recover lost information, assist with maintenance, enable reuse, and discover flaws. Reverse engineering tools include disassemblers, debuggers, and decompilers. The process involves system and code level analysis to document designs, components, and algorithms from binary code. While it faces limitations like legality issues and missing information, reverse engineering provides important benefits for software development and security analysis.

1. Software Reverse Engineering
Presented by: Parminder Singh
Roll no: 1607116

2. Contents
 What is Software Reverse Engineering?
 Why do we need it?
 Where it is used?
 RE tools
 Scope and Tasks
 Limitations
 Conclusion

3. Reverse Engineering
Reverse engineering also called back engineering,
is the processes of extracting knowledge or design
information from anything man-made and re-
producing it based on the extracted information.

4. Software Reverse Engineering
It is the process of analyzing a software system to
extract design and implementation information
and create representations of the system in another
form or at a higher level of abstraction.
Engineering a
Software
Reverse
Engineering
Concept Software
Software Concept

5. Requirements
Analysis
Design
Implementation
Forward
Engineering
Reverse
Engineering
Software Engineering

6. Why we need it?
 Recovery of lost information
 Providing proper system documentation
 Assisting with maintenance
 Facility of software reuse
 Synthesize higher abstraction
 Discovering unexpected flaws and faults

7. Where it is used?
 In software design, reverse engineering enables
the developer or programmer to add new
features to the existing software with or without
knowing the source code.
 Reverse engineering is also very beneficial in
software testing, it helps the testers to study the
virus and other malware code.
 The third category where reverse engineering is
widely used is in software security.(Malicious
Software, Cryptographic algorithms)

8. Reverse Engineering Tools
 System Monitoring Tools
• Network activity, file access and register
access
 Disassemblers
• Translate binary code to assembly code
 Debuggers
• It used in disassembling mode to set break
points and step through program execution

9. Continue…
 Decompilers
• Attempt to produce high level code (e.g, c)
from an executable binary code.
 Hex Editors
• Read executing program from RAM
• Enable the editing of running hexadecimal
code

10. The Reversing Process
 System Level Process
• Techniques that help to determine the internal
structure.
• Most of the information comes from O/S ,hence
O/S monitoring utilities.
 Code Level Process
• Techniques provides detailed information from
selected code segment
• Involves extracting design concepts and
algorithms from the binary code

11. Scope and Task of SRE
 Redocumentation and/or documentation
generation
 Recovery of design approach and design details
at any level of abstraction.
 Identify reusable components
 Understanding high level system design

12. Limitations
 Illegal and frowned upon
 Limited understanding of design, research time
and cost
 Bugs may be introduced during the process
 Lack of information may cause failure

13. Conclusion
• Software Reverse Engineering is a new research
area among software maintenance
• It includes activities of understanding the system
and recovery info from system
• Program understanding is the most important
subset of Reverse Engineering
• Discovery of abstraction is key issue

14. References
 Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery: A
Taxonomy by Elliot J. Chikofsky and James H.
Cross II
 The Problem of Reverse Engineering by Robert W.
Gomulkiewicz and Mary L. Williamson
 Answers, Limitation of Reverse Engineering
 Wikipedia, Reverse Engineering
 Informit, Reverse Engineering Principles

15. Thank you.. and any..