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The law protects details like software graphics, interface design, file structure, and organization, etc. S ee Also: Complete Offensive Security and Ethical Hacking CourseĬopyright law protects software from both direct copying and close paraphrasing. The supreme court of the United States of America though, established standards that prevent many software inventions from being eligible in the first place for patent protection. In return, if the product is disclosed as a patent, the developer must reveal all the technical details. Patent law is one of the laws that protect inventions where it prevents other parties from copying an invention, to reverse engineer it. The law is not discouraging from taking apart the products available from almost any of the technologies that exist, including electronic, chemical, mechanical, software engineering, etc.Īlthough reverse engineering a prototype or a source code of a program prior to its release will result in legal consequences of its proven to be so. Researchers can also use this technique to reverse engineer malware to understand how it works to nullify its properties, identify the potential owner, and use the knowledge gained to update their virus databases and prepare mitigation measures for future malware attacks. The use of reverse engineering is also greatly exercised to identify malicious content in the source code of a software, such as viruses, or to expose security flaws(backdoors, virus, misconfigurations) and address possible privacy issues. In this digital-information age, reverse engineering has become a tool that can be used as a way to create compatible products that are cheaper than the existing ones or even free in some cases, uniquely modify the software, and exchange knowledge as a result into making better, more reliable and secure products.Ĭan be applied to various aspects of both software, and hardware development to understand how they behave under various conditions, to retrieve the source code that was lost, fix issues, to adapt existing software programs with new hardware, etc. Taken by older industries, the practice of reverse engineering is now widely used in the software engineering sector. The term reverse engineering, refers to the disassembling of an object, following a thorough examination of its composition/construction so to understand how it works to duplicate or upgrade the object.
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Reverse engineering as a part of software engineering
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