Another reverse engineering guide

Reverse Engineering for Everyone

I’d like to add that reverse engineering can also be done without any peeking at the thing you’re trying to reverse-engineer.

Andrew Tridgell explaining how he reverse engineered Microsoft’s SMB protocol with the “French cafe technique”: https://www.samba.org/ftp/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt

Tridge also reverse engineered BitKeeper, the proprietary software that Linus foolishly used to host Linux kernel development for a while. He noticed that if you telnet to the BitKeeper address:port rather than use its proprietary client, you can type “help” and it then spits out a list of commands to try…

You can then interrogate the repository with these commands and get a complete understanding of all the internal data structures, without ever using the proprietary software, let alone having to disassemble it.

The fact that Tridge did this reverse-engineering led BitKeeper’s owner, Larry McVoy, to rescind the Linux community’s use of his software, so Linus wrote git.

site: https://0xinfection.github.io/reversing/
discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41069256