Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Software reverse engineering

Software reverse engineering involves reversing a program's machine code (the string of 0s and 1s that are sent to the logic processor) back into the source code that it was written in, using program language statements.

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.

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