Funded by: Air Force Research Laboratory - Wright-Patterson
The PARE project is a one-year effort. Cigital Labs began work on this project in October 2002.
The goal of this project is to provide the sponsor with a report describing the state of the art in reverse engineering technologies. Techniques for understanding application binaries are a powerful tool in the hands of an adversary. They provide insights into the inner workings of an application and can be used to weaken the security of an information system. Though as a rule obscurity cannot be relied on as a security mechanism, it is, however, an essential piece of many real-world security applications, including copy-protection and software tamper-proofing.
In this project Cigital Labs will focus its study on the following topics: disassembly, decompilation, program understanding, and reverse engineering countermeasures. For each of these topics we will review the current state of the art and describe the major technical obstacles that need to be addressed. We will evaluate the most important tools in these categories and discuss ongoing research. Finally, we will use the insights gained during this process to predict major reverse engineering trends that will emerge in the coming years.