What is Reverse Engineering?

Reverse engineering (also known as reverse technology) is a process of product design technology reproduction, that is, reverse analysis and research of a target product, so as to deduct and obtain the product's processing flow, organizational structure, functional characteristics, and technical specifications, etc. Design elements to make products that have similar functions but not exactly the same. Reverse engineering stems from hardware analysis in the commercial and military fields. Its main purpose is to derive the design principle of the product directly from the analysis of the finished product when the necessary production information cannot be easily obtained.

Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering (also known as reverse technology) is a process of product design technology reproduction, that is, reverse analysis and research of a target product, so as to deduct and obtain the product's processing flow, organizational structure, functional characteristics, and technical specifications, etc. Design elements to make products that have similar functions but not exactly the same. Reverse engineering stems from hardware analysis in the commercial and military fields. Its main purpose is to derive the design principle of the product directly from the analysis of the finished product when the necessary production information cannot be easily obtained.

Reverse engineering may be mistaken as a serious violation of intellectual property rights, but in practice, it may protect intellectual property owners. For example, in the field of integrated circuits, if a company is suspected of infringing intellectual property rights, reverse engineering can be used to find evidence.

Chinese name

Reverse Engineering

Also known as

Reverse technology

Function

Protection of intellectual property owners

Power

Determine if competing products infringe patents or copyrights

The reasons for reverse engineering are as follows:

Interface design. Due to interoperability, reverse engineering is used to find collaborative protocols between systems.

Military or commercial secrets. Steal the latest research or product prototypes from your enemies or competitors.

Improve documentation. When the original documentation is inadequate, and when the system is updated without the original designer, reverse engineering is used to obtain the required data to supplement the description or understand the latest state of the system.

Software upgrade or update. Due to functional, compliance, and security requirements changes, reverse engineering is used to understand existing or legacy software systems to evaluate the work required to update or migrate the system.

Make unlicensed / unauthorized copies.

Academic / learning purposes.

Remove copy protection and masquerading login rights.

File loss: The case of reverse engineering is often that the file on a particular device has been lost (or not at all), and the person in charge of the project cannot be found. Complete systems often need to be redesigned based on outdated systems, which means that the only way to integrate existing functions into a project is to use reverse engineering to analyze existing fragments for redesign.

Product analysis: It is used to investigate the product operation mode, component composition, estimated budget, and identify potential infringements.

Reverse engineering is widely used in the fields of new product development and product modification design, product imitation, quality analysis and testing, and its functions are:

1. Shorten the design and development cycle of products, and speed up the upgrading and upgrading of products;

2. Reduce the cost and risk of enterprises developing new products;

3. Speed up product modeling and serialization design;

4, suitable for single-piece, small-volume parts manufacturing, especially mold manufacturing, can be divided into direct molding and indirect molding method. Direct molding method: The rapid direct molding method based on RP technology is to directly manufacture the results of mold CAD from the RP system. This method does not need to use RP system to make prototypes, nor does it rely on traditional mold manufacturing technology. It is particularly fast for metal mold manufacturing. It is a molding method with great development prospects; indirect molding method: indirect molding The method is to use RP technology to manufacture product part prototypes, use the prototype as a master mold, mold core or molding tool (grinding mold), and then combine with the traditional molding process to produce the required mold.

along with

Reverse Engineering (aka Reverse Engineering-RE) is a description of the product design process. At the beginning of 2007, China's related laws rectified the name of reverse engineering and recognized the legitimacy of reverse technology for learning and research.

In the general concept of engineering and technical personnel, the product design process is a process from design to product, that is, the designer first conceives the shape, performance and general technical parameters of the product in the brain, and then

There are multiple implementation methods for software reverse engineering, mainly three:

1. Analyze observations obtained through information exchange.

Most commonly used for protocol reverse engineering and involves the use of bus analyzers and packet sniffer. After accessing the connection of the computer bus or network and successfully intercepting the communication data, the behavior of the bus or network can be analyzed to create a communication implementation with the same behavior. This method is particularly suitable for reverse engineering of device drivers. Sometimes tools purposely made by hardware manufacturers, such as

Imageware

Reverse engineering can use existing 3D scanner technologies such as laser scanners, structural light source converters or X-ray tomography to carry out dimensional measurement on top of existing physical components, and then build 3D virtual models through CAD, CAM, CAE or other software Methods. Reverse engineering was often used in the military and was often used in World War II and the Cold War.

The more popular reverse engineering technology is

In the United States and many other countries, products or manufacturing laws are protected by trade secrets, as long as the products or manufacturing laws are reasonably obtained, they can be reverse engineered. Patents require your invention to be published, so patents can be researched without reverse engineering. One motivation for reverse engineering is to confirm whether a competitor's product infringes a patent or copyright.

Reverse engineering of software or hardware systems for interoperability (for example, support for undisclosed file formats or hardware peripherals) is considered legal, although patent holders often object and try to suppress their products for any purpose Reverse engineering performed.

In order to obtain the ideas and functional elements implied in a copyrighted computer program and have legitimate reasons to obtain them, when there is only one method of dismantling, according to law, dismantling is the fair use of copyrighted works.

Brain reverse engineering: Behind a black curtain in a small room, a titanium sapphire laser is aimed at a target: a half-centimeter-sized glass window surgically implanted into the skull of a living mouse. When the mouse ran on a white sphere like a treadmill and looked at a computer screen, the laser fired a gigabit of a second laser. If mice use certain brain cells, special dyes will make these cells emit green light, and their images will be captured by a camera sufficient to detect a single photon. The small mass of tissue in the mouse's skull turned the nerve impulses from the mouse's eye into an interaction. If the secrets of this process can be revealed, scientists can understand how mammals' brains experience the world. ^[1]