AI-assisted reverse engineering (AIARE) is a branch of computer science that leverages artificial intelligence (AI), notably machine learning (ML) strategies, to augment and automate the process of reverse engineering. The latter involves breaking down a product, system, or process to comprehend its structure, design, and functionality. AIARE was primarily introduced in the early years of the 21st century, witnessing substantial advancements from the mid-2010s onwards.
Conventionally, reverse engineering is conducted by specialists who dismantle a system to grasp its working principles, often for the purposes of reproduction, modification, enhancement of compatibility, or forensic examination. This method, while efficient, can be laborious and time-intensive, particularly when dealing with intricate software or hardware systems. [1] [2] [3]
AIARE integrates machine learning algorithms to either partially automate or augment this process. [4] [5] It is capable of detecting patterns, relationships, structures, and potential vulnerabilities within the analyzed system, frequently surpassing human experts in speed and accuracy. This has rendered AIARE a critical tool in numerous fields, including cybersecurity, software development, and hardware design and analysis. [6]
AIARE encompasses several AI methodologies:
Supervised learning employs tagged data to train models to recognize system components, their operations, and their interconnections. This method is particularly helpful in software analysis to discover vulnerabilities or enhance compatibility. [3] [7] [8]
Unsupervised learning is utilized to detect concealed patterns and structures in untagged data. It proves beneficial in comprehending complex systems where there's no evident labeling or mapping of components. [1] [9]
Reinforcement learning is employed to build models that progressively refine their system understanding through a process of trial and error. This method is often implemented when deciphering a system's functionality under various circumstances or configurations. [1] [5]
Deep learning is employed for analysis of high-dimensional data. For instance, deep learning techniques can aid in examining the layout and connections of integrated circuits (ICs), substantially reducing the manual effort required for reverse engineering. [3] [4]
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and uses learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.
Software cracking is an act of removing copy protection from a software. Copy protection can be removed by applying a specific crack. A crack can mean any tool that enables breaking software protection, a stolen product key, or guessed password. Cracking software generally involves circumventing licensing and usage restrictions on commercial software by illegal methods. These methods can include modifying code directly through disassembling and bit editing, sharing stolen product keys, or developing software to generate activation keys. Examples of cracks are: applying a patch or by creating reverse-engineered serial number generators known as keygens, thus bypassing software registration and payments or converting a trial/demo version of the software into fully-functioning software without paying for it. Software cracking contributes to the rise of online piracy where pirated software is distributed to end-users through filesharing sites like BitTorrent, One click hosting (OCH), or via Usenet downloads, or by downloading bundles of the original software with cracks or keygens.
Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been involved in artificial intelligence (AI) research at MIT since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer languages, in computer architecture, and in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design.
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance.
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
The expression computational intelligence (CI) usually refers to the ability of a computer to learn a specific task from data or experimental observation. Even though it is commonly considered a synonym of soft computing, there is still no commonly accepted definition of computational intelligence.
OllyDbg was an x86 debugger that emphasizes binary code analysis, which is useful when source code is not available. It traces registers, recognizes procedures, API calls, switches, tables, constants and strings, as well as locates routines from object files and libraries. It has a user friendly interface, and its functionality can be extended by third-party plugins. Version 1.10 is the final 1.x release. Version 2.0 was released in June 2010, and OllyDbg has been rewritten from the ground up in this release. Although the current version of OllyDbg cannot disassemble binaries compiled for 64-bit processors, a 64-bit version of the debugger has been promised. As of April 2022 the development of the project has been frozen and an incomplete 64-bit version can be downloaded from the website.
Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering is a textbook written by Eldad Eilam on the subject of reverse engineering software, mainly within a Microsoft Windows environment. It covers the use of debuggers and other low-level tools for working with binaries. Of particular interest is that it uses OllyDbg in examples, and is therefore one of the few practical, modern books on the subject that uses popular, real-world tools to facilitate learning. The book is designed for independent study and does not contain problem sets, but it is also used as a course book in some university classes.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in applications throughout industry and academia. Similar to electricity or computers, AI serves as a general-purpose technology that has numerous applications. Its applications span language translation, image recognition, decision-making, credit scoring, e-commerce and various other domains. AI which accommodates such technologies as machines being equipped perceive, understand, act and learning a scientific discipline.
Reverse engineering is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little insight into exactly how it does so. Depending on the system under consideration and the technologies employed, the knowledge gained during reverse engineering can help with repurposing obsolete objects, doing security analysis, or learning how something works.
Deformulation refers to a set of analytical procedures used to separate and identify individual components of a formulated chemical substance. Deformulation applies methods of analytical chemistry and is often used to obtain competitive intelligence about chemical products. Deformulation is related to reverse engineering; however, the latter concept is most closely associated with procedures used to discover working principles of a device or a designed system through examination and disassembly of its structure. The term, reverse engineering, has become specifically and almost exclusively linked to the field of software engineering; whereas, deformulation is a term more applicable to the field of chemical manufacturing. Deformulation of a multicomponent chemical mixture may occur in several contexts, including the investigation of causes of chemical product failure, competitive benchmarking, legal inquiry to obtain evidence of patent infringement, or new product research and development. Depending upon this context and upon the level of information sought, the requirements of analyses for deformulation may differ. Deformulation processes typically require the application of several analytical methods, and the selection of methods is dependent upon the degree of confidence required in the results. Methods of deformulation also have similarity to methods of forensic chemistry in which analytical procedures may be applied to discover the causes of material failure or to resolve a legal question.
Jeffrey Adgate "Jeff" Dean is an American computer scientist and software engineer. Since 2018, he has been the lead of Google AI. He was appointed Alphabet's chief scientist in 2023 after a reorganization of Alphabet's AI focused groups.
OpenNN is a software library written in the C++ programming language which implements neural networks, a main area of deep learning research. The library is open-source, licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Semantic Scholar is a research tool for scientific literature powered by artificial intelligence. It is developed at the Allen Institute for AI and was publicly released in November 2015. Semantic Scholar uses modern techniques in natural language processing to support the research process, for example by providing automatically generated summaries of scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, human–computer interaction, and information retrieval.
This glossary of artificial intelligence is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of artificial intelligence, its sub-disciplines, and related fields. Related glossaries include Glossary of computer science, Glossary of robotics, and Glossary of machine vision.
Explainable AI (XAI), often overlapping with Interpretable AI, or Explainable Machine Learning (XML), either refers to an artificial intelligence (AI) system over which it is possible for humans to retain intellectual oversight, or refers to the methods to achieve this. The main focus is usually on the reasoning behind the decisions or predictions made by the AI which are made more understandable and transparent. XAI counters the "black box" tendency of machine learning, where even the AI's designers cannot explain why it arrived at a specific decision.
The Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) is the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with the Internet of things (IoT) infrastructure to achieve more efficient IoT operations, improve human-machine interactions and enhance data management and analytics.
VITAL was a Board Management Software machine learning proprietary software developed by Aging Analytics, a company registered in Bristol (England) and dissolved in 2017. Andrew Garazha declared that the project aimed "through iterative releases and updates to create a piece of software capable of making autonomous investment decisions." According to Nick Dyer-Witheford, VITAL 1.0 was a "basic algorithm".