Check out Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes, a blog devoted to the discussion of reverse engineering theories and practice, as well as multimedia technology.

Welcome to a series of esoteric articles on the topic of reverse engineering. Eventually, I would like for this page to be home to practical advice about software reverse engineering. For now, it is a repository of my random thoughts and experiments regarding the subject.

For brevity, note these abbreviations:

• RE = reverse engineer
• RE'ing = reverse engineering
• RE'd = reverse engineered

Reverse Engineering Articles

• Introduction: Why is this site here?
• Experiments in Software RE: This article discusses some basic RE ideas and speculates on some better approaches. Topics include basic binary disassembly, finding function boundaries and generating call trees for binaries, and execution profiling without debug information.
• Case Study: Xan Video Codec: This article applies some RE ideas towards an older video codec named Xan.
• Case Study: Microsoft Windows Media Video 9: This article applies some RE ideas towards a more modern video codec, Microsoft's WMV9.
• Using strace(1) on Linux: strace(1) is a Linux tool that traces system calls and can provide intelligence in RE efforts. This article also includes a case study with RadGameTools' standalone Bink video player for Linux.
• gen-calltree-dumpbin.pl: This is a Perl script that takes the output of a "dumpbin.exe /disasm <file.lib>" command (part of Microsoft's developement suite) and organizes a shallow call tree. Here are some of examples of the script in action dissecting a series of multimedia-related libraries available for free as part of Microsoft's Embedded Evaluation Software:

  cedrm.lib cedrm2.lib iccvid.lib (Cinepak) drmutils.lib dvdnav.lib

  janusdrm.lib janusdrmila.lib wma8_rawdec_wince_x86.lib wmav9_rawdec_wince_x86.lib wmv9_rawdec_wince_x86.lib

  For more information, see this blog entry:
  Seeing The Forest For The Call Trees
• Subverting Retroguard: This article deals with subverting a popular Java obfuscator program to be a partial Java de-obfuscator.

Other RE Sites Of Note

• Home page of Cristina Cifuentes, patron saint of software reverse engineering
• Boomerang, an open source reverse compiler
• Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software, an online book detailing the study and practice of different types of software RE