Summary of Reverse Engineering - Computerphile

00:00:00 - 00:15:00

The video discusses how reverse engineering can be used to understand how a piece of software works. It demonstrates how to use the ida tool to examine the machine code of a program and create a rudimentary understanding of its structure and behavior.

• 00:00:00 Reverse engineering is a process of figuring out how a piece of software works by analyzing the source code or low-level code. It is often used in cybersecurity to analyze malware or to extract data from a piece of software that is no longer supported.
• 00:05:00 In this video, the computerphile discusses how to break down a problem into data structures, algorithms, and code. They go on to discuss how reverse engineering works, noting that it often involves getting closer to the actual code being executed on the computer.
• 00:10:00 Reverse engineering is the process of understanding a program's inner workings by examining its binary code. By doing so, one can make educated guesses about the functions it performs, the data structures it uses, and the overall architecture of the program. One tool used for reverse engineering is ida, an interactive disassembler. ida allows the user to view the machine code of a program, as well as the op codes that make it up. Once this is done, the user can use this information to create a rudimentary understanding of the program's structure and behavior.
• 00:15:00 In this video, Reverse Engineering computer code is discussed. After discussing how a computer program works, the author demonstrates how to find the arguments and options a program takes, by looking at the code and deducing what it does. This is a classic example of how to use reverse engineering to find out information about a piece of software.