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Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of taking something (a device, an electrical component, a software program, etc.) apart and analyzing its workings in detail, and after that to reconstruct a new
device/program/etc. that does the same thing, without actually copying anything from the original. The verb form is to reverse-engineer, spelled with a hyphen.
Reverse-engineering is commonly done to avoid copyrights on desired
functionality, and may be used for avoiding patent law, though this is a bit risky:
patents apply to the functionality, not a specific implementation of it.
Reverse-engineering things (like software) for the purposes of interoperability (i.e. supporting file formats etc.) is mostly believed to be legal, though patent owners
often aggressively pursue their patents.
Reverse engineering of electronic components
Coordinate-measuring machines (CMM) can be used to digitise a circuit and the information can be
utilised in computer-aided modelling. New and improved techniques in reverse engineering include laser scanning which, as the name
implies, uses laser beams to scan across the surface of components of any shape and display the results in real time.
Reverse engineering of software
Reverse engineering can also apply to software. For example, reverse engineering
of binaries for the Java platform can be accomplished using ARGOuml.org . One very famous case of reverse engineering was the first non-IBM implementation of BIOS.
In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act exempts
from the circumvention ban some acts of reverse engineering aimed at interoperability of file formats and protocols (17 USC
1201 (f)), but judges in key cases
have ignored this law.
The Samba software, which allows systems that are not running
Microsoft Windows systems to share files with systems that are,
is a classic example of software reverse engineering, since the Samba project had to reverse engineer unpublished information
about how Windows file sharing worked, so that non-Windows computers could emulate this. The WINE project does the same thing for the Windows API, and OpenOffice.org is one party doing this for the Microsoft Office file formats.
Reverse engineering of software can be accomplished by decompilation
or disassembly using a disassembler.
Reverse engineering as business research
Reverse engineering is also used by businesses to assess competitors' products. It is used to analyze, for
instance, how a competitor's product works, what it does, who manufactures it, what components it consists of, estimate costs,
identify potential patent infringement, etc.
Value engineering is a related activity also used by business. It involves deconstructing and analysing
products, but the objective is to find opportunities for cost cutting.
See also
External links
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