Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Mark Stamp. "An introduction to software reverse engineering". Peter Stavroulakis and Mark Stamp (eds.), 31, Springer, 2010.

Abstract
Software reverse engineering (SRE) is the practice of analyzing a software system, either in whole or in part, to extract design and implementation information. A typical SRE scenario would involve a software module that has worked for years and carries several rules of a business in its lines of code; unfortunately the source code of the application has been lost – what remains is “native” or “binary” code. Reverse engineering skills are also used to detect and neutralize viruses and malware, and to protect intellectual property. Computer programmers proficient in SRE will be needed should software components like these need to be maintained, enhanced, or reused. It became frightfully apparent during the Y2K crisis that reverse engineering skills were not commonly held amongst programmers. Since that time, much research has been under way to formalize just what types of activities fall into the category of reverse engineering, so that these skills could be taught to computer programmers and testers. To help address the lack of SRE education, several peerreviewed articles on SRE, software re-engineering, software reuse, software maintenance, software evolution, and software security were gathered with the objective of developing relevant, practical exercises for instructional purposes. The research revealed that SRE is fairly well described and all related activities mostly fall into one of two categories: software development- related and software-security-related. Hands-on reversing exercises were developed in the spirit of these two categories with the goal of providing a baseline education in reversing both Wintel machine code and Java bytecode.

Electronic downloads

• HTML

  Mark Stamp. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/699.html"
  ><i>An introduction to software reverse
  engineering</i></a>, Peter Stavroulakis and Mark
  Stamp (eds.), 31, Springer, 2010.

• Plain text

  Mark Stamp. "An introduction to software reverse
  engineering". Peter Stavroulakis and Mark Stamp (eds.),
  31, Springer, 2010.

• BibTeX

  @inbook{Stamp10_IntroductionToSoftwareReverseEngineering,
      author = {Mark Stamp},
      editor = {Peter Stavroulakis and Mark Stamp},
      title = {An introduction to software reverse engineering},
      chapter = {31},
      publisher = {Springer},
      year = {2010},
      abstract = {Software reverse engineering (SRE) is the practice
                of analyzing a software system, either in whole or
                in part, to extract design and implementation
                information. A typical SRE scenario would involve
                a software module that has worked for years and
                carries several rules of a business in its lines
                of code; unfortunately the source code of the
                application has been lost � what remains is
                �native� or �binary� code. Reverse
                engineering skills are also used to detect and
                neutralize viruses and malware, and to protect
                intellectual property. Computer programmers
                proficient in SRE will be needed should software
                components like these need to be maintained,
                enhanced, or reused. It became frightfully
                apparent during the Y2K crisis that reverse
                engineering skills were not commonly held amongst
                programmers. Since that time, much research has
                been under way to formalize just what types of
                activities fall into the category of reverse
                engineering, so that these skills could be taught
                to computer programmers and testers. To help
                address the lack of SRE education, several
                peerreviewed articles on SRE, software
                re-engineering, software reuse, software
                maintenance, software evolution, and software
                security were gathered with the objective of
                developing relevant, practical exercises for
                instructional purposes. The research revealed that
                SRE is fairly well described and all related
                activities mostly fall into one of two categories:
                software development- related and
                software-security-related. Hands-on reversing
                exercises were developed in the spirit of these
                two categories with the goal of providing a
                baseline education in reversing both Wintel
                machine code and Java bytecode.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/699.html}
  }
  

Posted by Mark Stamp on 4 Apr 2010.
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