Re: Reverse engineering != piracy (was Re: RosAsm disassembler output vs. IDA Pro)

From: Gerhard W. Gruber (sparhawk_at_gmx.at)
Date: 01/28/04 

Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 21:56:32 +0100

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 03:14:46 GMT wrote "Randall Hyde"
<randyhyde@earthlink.net> in alt.lang.asm with
<GOFRb.30418$zj7.28784@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>

>I don't know how much time you've ever spent with a *good* disassembler
>reverse-engineering some code and bringing up to acceptable standards (God
>forbid you try this with a *bad* disassembler!), but it's a tremendous
>amount of work. If you've got the source code to the original routines *in just

My main purpose of using ASM is for reverse engineering, though I usually
don't do it that far to get a assemblying sourcecode from it, but even if you
just try to find something particular, extract a function or similar stuff is
quite a lot of work. I did some reverse engineering on the Amiga back then,
because the official documentation was so wrong on some points that it was
unusable and the only way was to reverse engineer and document the library we
needed. But this takes still quite a lot of time and of course in this case yo
have the advantage of having a documention, which, even when wrong, gives you
a rough idea what a particular code is supposed to do. :)

>"Two-click" disassembly/reassembly is the "holy grail" of the disassembly
>crowd. Unfortunately, like the mythical grail, it's never going to be
>achieved.
>Even if it were perfect, it's still a ton of work to try and use the
>disassembler the way that Rene is suggesting. It's much easier to do the translation
>manually.

As I said in my other post, even if the disassembling process is perfect,
there is an inherent flaw which will prevent the creation of a usefull
sourcecode, for almost all non-trivial and interesting pieces of code.
Espeicially if the intention is to reuse that source then for your own
purposes.

>If Rene is *really* interested in doing something to make life easier for
>RosAsm users, he'd drop the disassembler project immediately and get to work on

He would implement proper library support. :)

>a MASM->RosAsm translator. Those who want a disassembler could then

It shouldn't be that hard to write a MASM translator with lexx & yacc if you
are bent on it. Of course this violates the "Holy Assembly" approach. :) 

-- 
Gerhard Gruber
Maintainer of
SoftICE for Linux - http://pice.sourceforge.net/
Fast application launcher - http://sourceforge.net/projects/launchmenu

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