I've read in the EULA's (End User License Agreement) of most of softwares that reverse engineering is probhited. Anyone out there plese tell me about reverse engineering and how it is done. I am a buddiing programmer. So I want to know about the Internal Details of Software and how they function. Is there any way to study these things and know more about them.


This post has been edited by jlhaslip: Jan 14 2006, 06:54 PM

Read this: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/sigmil/RevEng/index.html

It's a beginner's guide to reverse engineering. By "beginner's", I mean very long.

reverse engineering is taking the finished product and trying to figure out how it works by taking it apart.

In terms of reverse engineering software, it really is difficult unless it is open source. the problem with "taking apart" software is that software is compiled into binary. You have to decompile it to make any sense of a program. But, when the program is decompiled, it is not exactly how it was whwn it was compiled.

As for the user agreement not allowing reverse engineering, they will never know you did it unless they can read minds.

Reverse engineering of software is protected under the dmca for educational purposes under the fair use clause.

Basically, if you want to reverse engineer "doom 3" then you have the right to. where things get "ugly" in the legal sense is what your allowed to do with what you reverse engineer. But for educational use it is expressly allowed.

Tread lightly, copywrite laws are ugly