Re: Ada News Brief - 96-05-24.txt [1/1]

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Richard asks

"  Will JBC be secure enough to prevent someone from using it to reverse
  engineer my software product?"

The answer is definitely NO!

But it is also the case that machine language is easy enough to reengineer
or reverse engineer if you want to. If you want to take a commercial
program for the PC, and spend the time, there are powerful disassembly
and analysis tools available that will enable you to do this reverse
engineering, no matter HOW much attempt has been made to obfuscate (in
extreme cases, you will need logic analyzers and in-circuit emulators,
but this is all very accessible and very practical technology).

Almost anyone working at a low level on PC's has had to spend time
reverse engineering parts of DOS for instance to understand what was
going on, and as an example, take a look at the (perfectly atrocious)
ruling against Stacker in the Microsoft-Stacker case (I am talking
about the counter award, not the main award in the other direction).