Two questions

[Peter Hansen]

rbt wrote:
> Peter Hansen wrote:
>> Philosophy not entirely aside, you should note that object code in any 
>> language can "easily" be reverse-engineered in the same way, with the 
>> only difference being the degree of ease involved.  If the code is 
>> worth enough to someone that they are willing to risk violating your 
>> license terms, they *will* be able to recover enough source code 
>> (whether it was Python, C, or assembly) to do what they need.  
> 
> Don't intend to hijack this thread, but this bit interests me. I know
> several accomplished C/assembly programmers who have told me that 
> reverse engineering object code from either of these two languages is 
> anything but trivial. Yet, I *hear* and *read* the opposite all of the 
> time. Can anyone actually demonstrate a decompile that mirrors the 
> original source?

It all depends on the definition of "reverse engineering".

In my opinion and experience, very little code in the world is so 
sophisticated that it is not roughly as easy to write equivalent code 
from scratch (with the original, working program as a guide of what the 
code actually does) as it would be to convert the object code back into 
source.  (Exceptions such as "decompyle" which may make the job near 
trivial aside.)

If that's true, it leaves us with a very small subset of the code in any 
given program, that might actually be worth the effort of converting 
back to source.  That bit of code will generally turn out to be so small 
that once again an automated conversion to source is not really 
necessary, since analysis of the object code would with relatively 
little effort allow one to "reverse engineer" some equivalent source, in 
whatever language (or pseudo-code) one chose.

So, for languages like C, where the compilation process is fairly 
"destructive" to things like the variable names and control structures 
used, "reverse engineering" in the sense of "automated conversion back 
to equivalent source code" is rather difficult, probably infeasibly so 
for most non-trivial programs.  I personally don't understand the need 
for this, other than in the case of "I lost my source", and the correct 
answer there is a session of pummelling, followed by tarring and 
feathering with the pages of the Subversion Book.

On the other hand, "reverse engineering" in the sense of "creating 
source code capable of reproducing the effects of the valuable and 
interesting parts of the object code" is not that difficult, and in the 
sense of "understanding how this code works" is even easier, being just 
the first part of that step.

Software development is far more about choosing the right problems to 
solve and the right ways to solve them than it is about writing source 
code for the program that will do the job.

And if I had an automated tool to reproduce source code for a given 
program, I'd still be very concerned that I didn't end up with any of 
its automated test cases. ;-)

-Peter