Reverse Engineering - Motivation

Motivation

Reasons for reverse engineering:

• Interfacing. RE can be used when a system is required to interface to another system and how both systems would negotiate is to be established. Such requirements typically exist for interoperability.
• Military or commercial espionage. Learning about an enemy's or competitor's latest research by stealing or capturing a prototype and dismantling it. It may result in development of similar product.
• Improve documentation shortcomings Reverse engineering can be done when documentation of a system for its design, production, operation or maintenance have shortcomings and original designers are not available to improve it. RE of software can provide the most current documentation necessary for understanding the most current state of a software system
• Obsolescence Integrated circuits often seem to have been designed on obsolete, proprietary systems, which means that the only way to incorporate the functionality into new technology is to reverse-engineer the existing chip and then re-design it.
• Software Modernization. RE is generally needed in order to understand the 'as is' state of existing or legacy software in order to properly estimate the effort required to migrate system knowledge into a 'to be' state. Much of this may be driven by changing functional, compliance or security requirements.
• Product Security Analysis.. To examine how a product works, what are specifications of its components, estimate costs and identify potential patent infringement. Acquiring sensitive data by disassembling and analysing the design of a system component.. Another intent may be to remove copy protection, circumvention of access restrictions.
• Creation of unlicensed/unapproved duplicates.
• Academic/learning purposes. RE for learning purposes may be understand the key issues of an unsuccessful design and subsequently improve the design.
• Competitive technical intelligence (understand what your competitor is actually doing, versus what they say they are doing).