Reverse Engineering of Windows Distribution

Markus Stenzel m.stenzel at allanime.de
Mon Jul 7 20:07:07 EDT 2003


The exe was compiled using py2exe. I have identified a set of well known 
initials "PK" (Phil Katz, author of the legendary PKZIP software) - and 
in fact there was a ZIP embedded in the executable at position 9000C.

Unpacking this zip resulted in a bunch of .pyc files which I'm currently 
running through the beta version of the decompyle package. Wonder if 
that will work ;)

Thanks for your help Peter.

   Markus

Peter Hansen wrote:
> The packaging process used might be useful to know: was it py2exe, or the 
> Macmillan Installer?
> 
> Note, in case you weren't aware, that you won't actually get back the 
> *source*, such that you could easily modify it and recompile.  You'll
> get back the compiled (bytecode) file, which you could put into a .pyc
> file and run in place of the "bad" .py file which you have... at least
> in theory.
> 
> Retrieving the source itself is even more involved.  It requires
> decompiling (see "decompyle"), although if you go that route you should
> get back something very close to the original.  Maybe even enough for you
> to do a "diff" and patch the latest version to work again?
> 
> Sounds like a lot of work though.  Wouldn't it be easier to work with
> the author to fix the problem in the supported versions, and use them?
> 
> -Peter





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