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Reverse Engineering: Purposes, Methodologies, Tools, and Law

by Andrew Schulman

The following are notes for a forthcoming book, which will include the use of reverse engineering as a fact-gathering tool in litigation, when the working or composition of a product or system is at issue. Contact the author for more information.

Also see articles on “Reverse engineering as a fact-investigation tool in software patent litigation,” “Hiding in plain sight: Using reverse engineering to uncover (or help show absence of) software patent infringement,” and “Open to inspection: Using reverse engineering to uncover software prior art.”

The forthcoming book will include detailed coverage of hardware reverse engineering (based on the work of GreyB, such as “How we used electrical signal analysis” to detect smartphone processes), and of reverse engineering for non-litigation purposes.

from Undocumented DOS: A Programmer’s Guide to Reserved MS-DOS Functions and Data Structures by Andrew Schulman et al.(2nd edition, Addison-Wesley, 1994) This nearly-ancient text (along with other selected chapters from Undocumented DOS and Undocumented Windows) is being presented as a case study in some methodologies of software reverse engineering, applied to mass-market software. Note that […]