I am doing research for my software construction course on Software Reverse Engineering an application or program used on the windows operating system. I am wondering about the steps that are included in the reverse engineering software process. For this process to be a success is there a set of steps or phases that are a requirement to be completed?
Unless your precisely following a formal process (e.g., criminal investigations might have precisely defined steps), the answer to this question depends on the answer of what is your RE question. Depending on what you are expecting to identify from the reverse engineering process the steps might be different. If you are expecting to identify if a software depends on a component or not is easier than answering if there are implementation errors on a given software. If you are not answering an specific question, you might define what is your purpose with the RE process. Do you want to understand how something specific works or do you want to reimplement the software on your own way? Anyway, I think there are 2 overall aspects to be covered: 1) Catalog everything. You need to identify which are the components of an application. Technically, you want to perform some static analysis to understand which are the filetypes, formats, and so on. This overview usually allows you to understand which component is responsible for which action, what are their dependencies, so on; and 2) Identify Component's interactions. You need to understand how data flow from one component to another. Technically, this might be associated to dynamic analysis procedures.
0. documentation (ha ha ha, you say)
1. access to source code (static analysis)
2. access to host environment/compiler (dynamic analysis)
3. a set of commands/steps to build the app
4. a set of commands to run with expected responses (to baseline)
5. a simple code change for proof of ability that the change you make is the change that results (proof of end-to-end is capable of reverse construction)
6. ever expanding theories and tests to verify proof of reverse engineering modifications (you fill in the blanks of what you want to do here)
If you don't have access to source code, my question to you would be, how much money, staff, and time do you have?
- Information Collection
- Examining the information
- Extracting the structure
- Recording the functionality
- Recording data flow
- Recording control flow
- Review extracted design
- Generate documentation
another vital portion of the RE is preparation and collection of test scenarios and related data.
later on if the application manifest with new modern technolgy, our assumption is user should have same results with same secnarios.
from my expiriance this is the most costly step with in such convertion projects
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