The What of Disassembly
In a traditional software development model, compilers, assemblers, and linkers are used by themselves or in combination to create executable programs. In order to work our way backwards (or reverse engineer programs), we use tools to undo the assembly and compilation processes. Not surprisingly, such tools are called disassemblers and decompilers, and they do pretty much what their names imply. A disassembler undoes the assembly process, so we should expect assembly language as the output (and therefore machine language as input). Decompilers aim to produce output in a high-level language when given assembly or even machine language as input.
The promise of “source code recovery” will always be attractive in a competitive ...
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