|
|
|
|
|
|
by blackflame7000
2915 days ago
|
|
|
Of course, they do! Reverse engineering is the skill of being able to see how things are put together without having the whole picture. It's having an intuition of where to find the clues to solve the bigger puzzle. From decerning which chip to decode to find the encryption key, to deducing that a broken fan blade is the only item that could strike a window at high enough velocity to shatter it, the skills are the same. A software reverse engineer is good because they possess many of the same traits as other types of reverse engineers. It's just a matter of how they apply their skill. |
|
|
> Of course, they do! Reverse engineering is the skill of being able to see how things are put together without having the whole picture.
I disagree and have done quite some reverse engineering out of private interest. To me it was mostly about learning and applying an excessive amount of knowledge about obscure trivia that can hardly be applied anywhere else (except perhaps for some really rare embedded developing stuff), such as knowledge about some obscure flags in the linker format, knowledge about aracane details of the call convention and instruction encoding, arcane features of the respective CPU/chipset that probably only OS developers are even aware of, etc.
This is what > 90% of reverse engineering consist of for me: Learning/having/applying an immense knowledge of a giant amount of arcane details that are hardly useful anywhere else.
> It's having an intuition of where to find the clues to solve the bigger puzzle.
I am not aware that I have used a lot of intuition. It is rather a lot about documenting everything well, documenting how each subsystem/function relates to others, ... lots of long, monotonous (but not boring) documentation. The reasons is that if you do not document a lot, you will soon be struck by the immense amount of details. A little bit like how you would document the inner workings of a space ship that landed on earth exhaustively in terms of lots engineering diagrams.