|
|
|
|
|
|
Reverse Engineering
Is it Cracking?
People think that "Reverse Engineering"(i'll call it RE from now on)
is an illegal act because of it's relationship with the Cracking scene.
But cracking isn't even illegal if it's correctly done with healthy
thoughts.
RE and Cracking does share technologies but they are not
the same matter. As the word "Engineering" implies, productivity is
the prime concern for RE. But when it comes to Cracking, the knowledge
itself is the main point. You don't get rich by Cracking. Nor do you
get the fame from the real society(Although you get some fame from the
virtual society or perhaps get infamous?).
Where Cracking started
No doubt, Cracking started with the invention(?) of protections.
The first cracks to come was for games. At that time(80s), people didn't
use computers for connecting to the internet with PPP. They didn't
use it for watching movies. They didn't use it for writing reports
for their math class. If they did, they were the priviledged people
who were getting support from some big places or people that had the
wealth. So there were no emerge for making protections. But for
games it was different. Kids playing them copied them to friends,
traded games and even make groups for those purposes
(which was the origin of the so called Warez scene).
Software companies trying to stop the act(which the profit they earned
fell) created locks and protections. People didn't like the fact
since, for example, if his local copy was damaged in any ways,
they could do nothing. What if the price was too high? Anyway,
These thoughts made people "break(=crack)" the protections.
The guys who needed the games were interested on the fact that
they could COPY them, but the guys who did the hardcore work....
they were eager for the knowledge. They wanted to know how the
protection worked. They wanted to make new ways of cracking them.
They didn't matter how the jobs they have done gave an impact.
Whenever hearing of a new protection, they needed to get their
hands on them. So the Cracking scene needed to grow with the Warez
scene which is illegal for real, making people think that cracking
is illegal(which isn't).
Then
What is the difference on the technologic side? Simply,
RE looks at the tree when Cracking looks at the branches.
Cracking doesn't need to look at the whole trunk, but it only
needs to figure out the stream related to the wanted knowledge.
For AVers, They have almost no information about the virus they
are targeting to dissect. They need to "Reverse Engineer" the
virus to the bare bones. They need to know which part is exactly
the virus. They need to know what damage it does, how it infects
others, and blah blah blah(because of the mass creations of viruses,
AVers sometimes just infer from their experience). Crackers
needs to know only how a program protects itself(from debuggers,
unregistered users). Sometimes, the protection scheme relates
to the whole program. But that's a rare thing. Mostly they need
to know just THE specific part. It's not stealing. It's a method.
But since....
Anyway, the difference is just an attitude side thought. The whole planet
thinks RE = Cracking, so, let's think this way. RE > Cracking.
RE is a more elegant vocabulary. It's a more good-to-hear word
(at least for me:). RE != Cracking will be only a history.
Only the "Deep Impact" can stop the world :P
Give me the Technology
Only a small portion of programmers leads the world of
programming, and most of those few doesn't or can't release their
efforts to the public. (for various reasons like NDA's and their
characteristics, money, etc. I'm not saying this is a bad attitude
or some kind of thing to blame. There could be thousands of situations.
Also, most people has to program for a living :) Many portions of
bleeding technologies and concepts are in their hands but the same
or similar codes are being reinvented and recoded from other parts
of the world. I think it's some sort of wasting that nobody can stop.
But RE can loosen this. RE is a matter of developing more knowledge
and evolving it in a effective way. It will make our life better :)
Examples of application
VX/AV scene
The fight(or cooperation?) between the VX and the AV has been there for
quite a long time(well, relative to the computer history that is :).
The virii guys even competed with themselves with new techniques.
Mostly the sources weren't released so to hook up with the breed,
one had to "RE" the virus target. And since the virus had to be relatively
small to make them transparent from the AVs they were a good target
to make challenge. That way people even made virus clones even only
by modifying a signature or some memory address or active date(YOU Lamerz!).
For the AV side, RE is a essential technology. Everyone should have thought so :)
They needed to know how the virus gets infected, how the virus hides himself,
how it optains control, blah blah blah. The only ways to figure it out
was to face it and RE it! An irony is that the VXers REs the AV proggies.
Well thats mainly to get out from the sight of the AV proggies.
Packing/Unpacking scene
Since the success(?) of PKLite execution packing proggy(there were similar
proggies before but wasn't famous),
people got to know that this has a great potential on many things.
By packing the target one can save file size, sometimes even speed up
execution speed. But the most advantage was that the targets code
gets hidden and packed into some unrecognizable form. This made
programs hard to RE. So for the REers unpacking was a demand.
Another VX/AV like war begun :) Packers developed ways to
encrypt the packing target, detect debuggers, use holes,
relocate, twist and twirl. Unpackers again needed to know the techniques
and RE followed for the sake of RE :P
Yeah Yeah, Cracking scene
You know this.
Even Hacking
An example is SMB. The Microsoft guys didn't well-document the content
exchanged, so RE had to be involved. So there came Samba for the Unix
platform to mimic the operations. Hacking technique is a hacking technique.
But to develop one, sometimes RE is involved like this.
All together now!
The world is breaking its walls. The wall at berlin did, Europe is
trying to break walls, and even the scenes here are breaking their walls.
Because of another paradigm(or shall i call it crisis?), the technical
side are lacking technologies and those technologies are losing their
classifications(some say that it's not that the classification is vanishing
but it's getting more detailed and vast). The only category to be is RE.
Packing uses VX techniques, Hacking uses VX techniques, Foo is using Bar's techniques.
The potential is moving into a unified way. Into RE or non-RE.
References:
Codebreakers Magazine #4 "Reverse Engineering: The Viral Approach"
Fravia's "Is Reverse Engineering Legal"
Mammon's Reverse Engineering
(to be continued)
Note : Contents above are my thoughts. They are not definitive.
Here's some related links.
|
|
|
|
|
|