An Exploratory Account of Software Reverse Engineering in a Security Context
Tags: datascience, cybersecurity, reverseengineering
Published: 2021-06-07 13:28:32

Software protection refers to measures that can be taken by a software developer to prevent unauthorized use of their software, enforcing their licensing agreement and using anti-debugging and anti-reverse engineering techniques to protect their intellectual property (IP) against theft.
According to the BSA at least 37% of software in use worldwide is pirated. This figure is significantly higher in Asia, Latin America and BRIC countries. This represents a huge loss in revenue to software developers.
Software piracy can take many forms. Unlicensed software can easily be distributed online or via peer-to-peer networks free of charge. Sometimes, illegal copies are made to look like the genuine product and sold for a fee. However, piracy can often occur when your customers exceed the terms of their licensing agreement by installing extra copies or allowing many users to use a single license across a network.
Illegal cyberspace activities are increasing rapidly and many software engineers are using reverse engineering methods to respond to attacks. The security-sensitive nature of these tasks, such as the understanding of malware or the decryption of encrypted content, brings unique challenges to reverse engineering: work has to be done offline, files can rarely be shared, time pressure is immense, and there is a lack of tool and process support for capturing and sharing the knowledge obtained while trying to understand plain assembly code. To help many gain a clear understanding of this reverse engineering work, this article is intended to echo on an exploratory account done in a security context.
In his 1987 article, the tech Legend Fred Cohen coined the term “computer virus” to describe self-reproducing programs designed to infect other computer programs. At that time, computer viruses were created for experimentation purposes or merely for fun, therefore causing little to no damage to real world systems .

Today’s landscape shows us a different scenario. Computers are widely used in criminal activities such as bank fraud, identity theft, and corporate theft. According to a recent Symantec report , 2010 saw an average of 260,000 identities exposed in data breaches caused by hacking, and 42% more vulnerabilities related to mobile platforms — up to 163 in 2010 from 115 in 2009.
Illegal activities in cyberspace affect national security and threaten citizen’s rights and privacy, thus having significant political, economic, and social implications.

Sponsored by organized crime or entrepreneurial goals, hackers have been developing malicious software, or “malware”. Forms of malware are not limited to viruses, but can also include worms, trojan horses, and spyware, all of which can install themselves on a computer without the computer owner’s informed consent.
Organized cyber groups typically communicate using cryptographic protocols and store information using encrypted files or systems. As a countermeasure against cybercrime, government institutions and business organizations have been using reverse engineering methods to analyze malicious code and break into password protected file systems.
This article reports the findings of a field study conducted with security engineers working in a research and development government organization. We consider their setting and work context to be unique for the following reasons. First, time sensitivity is an issue when dealing with malware. Software reverse engineers may have to quickly analyze and understand malicious code to provide a fast response on how to block and remove a particular piece of malware. Second, co-workers may have to be off the network as a way to mitigate the risk of infecting other computers and to protect sensitive information regarding system vulnerabilities. As such, coordinating work among team members is a challenging issue, even when collocated, since air gaps are required when exchanging information, which limits the use of modern collaborative tools. Third, documenting the reverse engineering process is a great challenge as engineers use different tools and typically create artifacts for their own use (Example; data flow and sequence diagrams). As a result, transferring knowledge is a hard task, which may require a great deal of face-to-face communication. Overall, security reverse engineers have special needs in terms of time sensitivity, coordination, communication, and documentation.
Ironically, to the best of the extent of research done, there are no studies which have investigated the work practices of security reverse engineers. Nonetheless, previous work has proposed reverse engineering tools for computer security analysis. Cristina Cifuentes introduced a high-level debugging tool which aims to reduce the amount of time needed to solve security-related problems. However, malware runtime analysis using a typical debugger is often not possible right away, mainly because modern malware usually has plenty of anti-debugging tricks that must be removed first. Quist and Liebrock presented a visualization tool for malware analysis but further work is needed to investigate how such tools would meet our participants’ needs. Powerful tools for program comprehension are important, but visualization is just part of the security engineer’s needs, as we will present in this paper.
As the word within the Article’s title suggests : “ Exploratorily” Their main task for this study was the understanding of targeted malware. This often goes beyond the work done by anti-virus companies, such as Symantec, as it involves identifying the perpetrators as much as possible in order to identify the type of attack as well as its political and social implications.
Two roles related to software reverse engineering: reverse engineers and developers building specialized tools to support reverse engineers. The latter was mainly tasked with creating plugins, particularly to automate discoveries of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows.
A. Processes
Five processes that are part of reverse engineering in a security context have been identified;
Analyzing: Analyzing assembly code is at the heart of most reverse engineering projects. Typical projects include the detection of malware, such as trojan horses, or the decryption of encrypted file systems. Assembly code is more difficult to understand than source code written in high-level programming languages because the code is less structured, often lacks meaningful symbols or data definitions, and allows for tricks that can mislead reverse engineers in their analysis efforts. Following the flow of data is challenging: “Understanding the data flow is a big part of understanding a program.”
1) Documenting: Documenting reverse engineering has several purposes. Some documentation is done to provide cognitive support for the reverse engineers at the time of the analysis, some documentation is meant to capture the reverse engineers’ own understanding of the code, and other documentation is meant to be shared either with team members or outside stakeholders. While it is already difficult to document source code written in high-level programming languages, it is even more difficult when dealing with assembly code. During the exploration of the assembly code, most reverse engineers document just enough information to be able to resume a task and do not document the paths that were explored without success.
2) Transferring Knowledge: Transferring knowledge is a challenge in reverse engineering. Documentation alone is often not enough to understand the work that has been completed by somebody else: “[I would] look at a version with comments, but I’d still need to jump through to understand.” In the current setting, information is usually passed on verbally or via email and chat. These mechanisms do not scale beyond groups of about five reverse engineers. To solve some of these issues, the idea of a workflow would be useful: “Right now it’s being done like a craft, and we , software engineers would like to have some kind of assembly line”. However, workflows are not consistent for all cases, and most workflow support tools are too constraining. In addition, conventions around documentation and standards on how to share information could improve the reverse engineering process: “Respecting conventions [would make it] easier to pass from one project to another.”
3) Articulating Work: Articulating work consists of all the items needed to coordinate a particular task, including scheduling sub-tasks, recovering from errors, and assembling resources. In reverse engineering, where tangible results are only produced when a path of exploration was successful, constantly re-doing work is a problem. Work was usually divided based on different pieces of hardware, different vulnerabilities, different functions, or different files. Relating information from the analysis of difference pieces of the problem was very difficult.
4) Reporting: When external stakeholders are involved, the final step in a project is reporting the results of the reverse engineering activities. In some cases, reporting includes a great deal of articulation work, especially when artifacts can be coopted as reports: “Instead of writing a report we shared a Word document.”
B. Tools
Tools used by the participants in our study can be classified as disassemblers, Office and visualization tools, and communication and coordination tools.
1) Disassemblers: Most of the reverse engineering work is performed using IDA Pro[1]. The Interactive Disassembler Pro is a commercial product that performs automatic code analysis and offers interactive functionality to support the understanding of
disassembly. Reverse engineers typically start with an automatically generated disassembly listing, then rename and annotate sections in the listing until they understand the code. Debuggers are rarely used for malware in the early stages of analysis since portions of the code are often
how a particular piece of malware works. Such reports rarely include enough detail to understand the inner workings of the malicious program, mostly because security companies do not want to reveal their insights to malware writers. In contrast, reports produced in our study setting had more technical content, and often included assembly code for functions as well as detailed descriptions of all input and output parameters. Table I summarizes our findings by showing the tools, artifacts, challenges, and needs for each of the processes we identified. Each work process described in the last section involved a different set of tools. These tools, in turn, were used to produce artifacts in distinct, non-interoperable formats. Therefore, moving from one process to another required a lot of manual work. For instance, reverse engineers typically used IDA Pro which provided them with a hyper-linked visual structure through which they could jump from one point of the assembly code to another. However, re-using this cognitive support across applications appeared to be a problem: “IDA Pro views are not bad, but they are difficult to export… I would export them to something where we can play with level of details, merge bugs together, higher level view of things — have to do this manually right now.”P1
By moving from the analysis to the documentation, engineers produce artifacts that would help them resume their own tasks, but also transfer their knowledge to other team members. For example, reverse engineers have tried using wiki-based systems for sharing mixed content (e.g., details on how particular hardware works, including pieces of code). However, wikis have shortcomings when navigating code and related artifacts: “Wikis are very document like, not ideal for documenting code — some kind of graph tool would have been better.”P1. Overall, even when knowledge sharing was encouraged, reverse engineers faced a lack of proper tools to pass information along to others: “There’s also stuff that we don’t know how to document.”P1. Navigation is particularly a challenge when dealing with different documents such as the cognitive support artifacts mentioned above. A map of all documents and their connections usually only exists in the reverse engineer’s head.
To articulate their work and break problems into pieces, engineers often followed a divide-and-conquer strategy: “We go after different pieces. The problem is how to share information then… different people have different processes.”P2. This poses an interesting phenomenon: there is no general process in the work of security reverse engineers. The following factors would influence this phenomenon:
missing for execution or because of anti-debugging tricks used by the malware that need to be removed first. As one of our interviewees described it, the main analysis tool used by reverse engineers in the security context is “brain power” ) Office and Visualization Tools: Most of the documentation is written using Microsoft Word, Excel, or OneNote. UML sequence diagrams are usually drawn to represent control flow understanding. However, the reverse engineers had “trouble finding good tools that draw graphs and make it easy to navigate and export graphs” Paper was also used, primarily for workflow support, small graphs, and articulation work.
3) Communication and Coordination Tools: For communication, only basic tools, such as e-mail and chat, were used. Our interviewees work in a co-located setting that allows faceto-face communication, but data sharing is complicated by the nature of the classified work. Interviewees coordinated work using tools such as wikis, bug trackers, and shared documents.
C. Artifacts
Artifacts created during the reverse engineering process in our setting consist of annotations, artifacts created for cognitive support, and reports.
1) Annotations: IDA Pro supports two notions of annotations: repeatable and non-repeatable. A repeatable annotation will appear attached to the current item as well as other items referencing it. Non-repeatable annotations only appear attached to the current item[1]. In addition, pre-comments and post-comments can be attached to lines and functions. All annotations also show up in the IDA Pro dependency graph.
The reverse engineers used annotations for several reasons: to keep track of variables, to rename functions, to document jumps, and to record where a particular piece of code was reading from or writing to. However, one of the challenges is that annotations are always incomplete: “When you document stuff you tend to skip stuff that’s obvious at the time.”P6
2) Cognitive Support Artifacts: Depending on the use case, different documents are created by the reverse engineers to aid their cognition. These include: memory maps, Excel or Word tables showing register usage and boot processes, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, and scripts. A common scenario is when an engineer needs to keep track of different paths that are being explored in order to understand a particular piece of code. One of our interviewees used Microsoft OneNote to do that: “I also used OneNote in other projects to keep track of paths that way. The last line in the OneNote document was the last path [that I had] explored.”P6
3) Reports: Companies focused on malware, such as Symantec, frequently create reports that give an overview of
1) how a particular piece of malware works. Such reports rarely include enough detail to understand the inner workings of the malicious program, mostly because security companies do not want to reveal their insights to malware writers. In contrast, reports produced in our study setting had more technical content, and often included assembly code for functions as well as detailed descriptions of all input and output parameters.

This table summarizes findings by showing the tools, artifacts, challenges, and needs for each of the processes identified. Each work process described in the last section involved a different set of tools. These tools, in turn, were used to produce artifacts in distinct, non-interoperable formats. Therefore, moving from one process to another required a lot of manual work. For instance, reverse engineers typically used IDA Pro which provided them with a hyper-linked visual structure through which they could jump from one point of the assembly code to another. However, re-using this cognitive support across applications appeared to be a problem: “IDA Pro views are not bad, but they are difficult to export… I would export them to something where we can play with level of details, merge bugs together, higher level view of things — have to do this manually right now.”P1
By moving from the analysis to the documentation, engineers produce artifacts that would help them resume their own tasks, but also transfer their knowledge to other team members. For example, reverse engineers have tried using wiki-based systems for sharing mixed content (e.g., details on how particular hardware works, including pieces of code). However, wikis have shortcomings when navigating code and related artifacts: “Wikis are very document like, not ideal for documenting code — some kind of graph tool would have been better.”P1. Overall, even when knowledge sharing was encouraged, reverse engineers faced a lack of proper tools to pass information along to others: “There’s also stuff that we don’t know how to document.” Navigation is particularly a challenge when dealing with different documents such as the cognitive support artifacts mentioned above. A map of all documents and their connections usually only exists in the reverse engineer’s head.

To articulate work and break problems into pieces, engineers often followed a divide-and-conquer strategy: “We go after different pieces. The problem is how to share information then… different people have different processes.”P2. This poses an interesting phenomenon: there is no general process in the work of security reverse engineers. The following factors would influence this phenomenon:
1) Task Complexity: Tasks, such as blocking malware and breaking into secure devices, often include unsolved problems, thus requiring the use of different approaches, tools, and skills. 2) Security: The security context further obstructs the reverse engineers’ work. Classified information cannot be shared, and for classified tasks, the reverse engineers are only allowed to work on classified, often un-networked, equipment. Often, information can not be transported since it could belong to
different projects, different classifications, or different machines. Even for unclassified contexts, such as malware, the nature of the code prohibits sharing to prevent further infection. This also means that a lot of the work has to be completed offline and access to web resources is very limited. Most of the reverse engineers in our study worked by themselves, often for security reasons: “I’m the only one allowed to look at it […] You don’t want others to be infected [with malware]”P2. The need to work individually also contributes to the increase in the effort needed to articulate work (e.g., summarizing work into a single report).
3) Time Constraints: The amount of time pressure depends on the scenario. Some projects have the goal of understanding everything about a particular piece of software and are usually completed without time pressure. In other scenarios, only a couple of weeks are allocated for a particular project in order to provide a fast response to a potentially harmful threat. In the latter case, the reverse engineers have to prioritize what they are working on. In the example of malware: “[We have] four goals when dealing with malware: detect, block, remove, [and] understand everything. Usually [the process] stops after the third step.”P7 The amount of documentation produced depends on the extent of the time pressure. Long-term projects without time pressure yield more documentation, whereas for short-term projects, there is often not enough time to document thoroughly: “If you put too much documentation, you won’t have enough time to finish.”P2
Tool Constraints: A graph is often the best way to capture a certain aspect of a reverse engineering problem, but it is difficult to deal with different types of diagrams. One of our interviewees told us that he sometimes spends up to 100 hours creating a single diagram. Also, the graphs produced are usually not linked to the disassembly, thus losing traceability.

3) There is a shortage of tools that span different aspects of reverse engineering such as hardware specifications and assembly code. The reverse engineering is also limited by memory since tools rarely scale beyond executables larger than a few megabytes.
While some of the analysis can be performed automatically, this is hindered by the fact that the disassembly produced by IDA Pro is not always perfect: “Everything has to be perfect if you want to do automated analysis.”P4 Creating plugins for IDA Pro is challenging when user interface functionality is required. The nature of assembly code yields additional requirements for tool support: addresses and offsets may change with every new version; malware code is often self changing; and following one trace through the code means jumping to many different locations, both in the code and in external modules (e.g., DLLs). Annotations in the disassembly do not capture the order in which certain calls are being made, hence the use of sequence diagrams.
VI. IMPLICATIONS
A. Process Implications
Software reverse engineers have to put a lot of effort into moving from one work process to another. For example, IDA Pro annotations are useful during the analysis, but using these annotations over time requires manually updating or tagging addresses to accommodate newer versions of malicious code. There is also a gap between annotations and high-level documentation such as memory maps and sequence diagrams. Transposing the barrier which separates each work process and dealing with a myriad of artifacts requires workflow support, both in processes and tools. However, since the nature of the tasks is already constrained, process or workflow tools should not add any additional constraints. In other words, process support for reverse engineers in a security context needs to be lightweight and flexible. First, it needs to support coordination by enabling the definition of sub-tasks while providing awareness on the progress of those tasks, and second, it should provide guidelines for high-level tasks that can be instantiated to meet the particular needs of a given context. To bridge the gap between distinct work processes, some level of standardization across different types of documentation could make it easier to capture and share knowledge in consistent ways.
B. Tool Implications
To support software reverse engineering in a security context, a suite of tools will likely always be needed to deal with different devices and rapidly changing malware. However, there is a need for tooling to support traceability of artifacts created by different tools. Supporting more powerful navigation interfaces and the visualization of different levels of abstraction is essential. Different levels of detail should be supported in different parts of the tooling to distinguish between low-level documentation for cognitive support at the time of analysis and high-level documentation for reporting purposes, and to distinguish between different levels in the structure of a piece of code. One of our interviewees used One Note for the latter: “[I] used OneNote […] and used tabbing to keep track of different levels in the structure.”
In our study setting, no formal version control mechanisms were used but most interviewees made frequent backups. To deal with conflicts, one of our interviewees had implemented tool support for merging two IDA Pro files. Version control across different tools and file formats could help integrate these efforts. A log of everything that has been done to a particular piece of code would be helpful to make sure that work is not duplicated. As described in the previous section, workflow support is also needed. However, such tooling must be flexible enough to support different tasks with different requirements (e.g., different time constraints and individual vs. collaborative work practices). Newcomers and experienced software reverse engineers should be supported in their efforts to learn new tasks as software, malware, devices, and tools change rapidly. Documentation should not just communicate results, but also describe how these results were derived.
VII. LIMITATIONS
As with any chosen methodology, there are limitations with research methods., Gaining access to the unique setting of security reverse engineers is difficult due to time constraints and the security restrictions of their setting. As this is one of the first studies of reverse engineering in a security context, that is believed to provide initial insights on the impact of factors such as security limitations, time constraints, and insufficient tool support.
VIII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The work setting of reverse engineers tasked with security related issues, such as the detection of malware or the decryption of encrypted file systems, is unique. Web resources are often unavailable because work has to be performed offline, files can rarely be shared to avoid infecting co-workers with malware or because information is classified, time pressure is immense, and tool support is limited.
To gain an understanding of the work done by security reverse engineers, and to inform industry and academia of their unique work practices, I conducted an exploratory study aimed at understanding their processes, tools, artifacts, challenges, and needs. I identified five processes: analyzing assembly code, documenting findings through different kinds of artifacts, transferring knowledge to other reverse engineers, articulating work, and reporting of findings to stakeholders. A discovery of lack of adequate tools to support the tasks that might also be prevalent in other reverse engineering settings was found. There is no general process that can capture all of the work done by security reverse engineers. Task complexity, security context, time pressure, and tool constraints make it impossible to follow a structured heavyweight process. Therefore, process and tool support has to be lightweight and flexible.
Reverse engineering in a security context is a fast-changing environment. New tools and approaches have to be learned on the spot as hackers and organized cyber groups create new security threats with implications for national security. Future work lies in addressing the challenges that we have identified with improved tools and processes, and in studying their usefulness in the unique work environment of security reverse engineers.
My name is Jay Dwayne. A former baby, still a Fire Fighter and currently a Software Engineer. Thankyou for making it to the end of this Article.
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http://www.jaydwayne.com


REFERENCES
[1] F. Cohen, “Computer viruses: Theory and experiments,” Computers & Security, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 22–35, 1987.
[2] T. F. Peterson, A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT. The MIT Press, 2011.
[3] Symantec, “Internet security threat report (2010),” Available online: http://www.symantec.com/business/threatreport/topic.jsp?id=threatreport&aid=notable statistics. Last access: 6/23/2011.
[4] K.-K. Choo, “Organised crime groups in cyberspace: a typology,” Trends in Organized Crime, vol. 11, pp. 270–295, 2008.
[5] C. Cifuentes, T. Waddington, and M. Van Emmerik, “Computer security analysis through decompilation and high-level debugging,” in Proceedings of the 8th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, 2001, pp. 375– 380.
[6] D. Quist and L. Liebrock, “Visualizing compiled executables for malware analysis,” in VizSec 2009: 6th International Workshop on Visualization for Cyber Security. IEEE, 2009, pp. 27–32.
[7] E. M. Gerson and S. L. Star, “Analyzing due process in the workplace,” ACM Transactions on Information Systems, vol. 4, pp. 257–270, 1986.
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