| Reverse Engineering |
Article Index for Reverse |
Website Links For Reverse Engineering |
Information AboutReverse Engineering |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT REVERSE ENGINEERING | |
| engineering | |
| production and manufacturing | |
| software engineering | |
|
In the United States and many other countries, even if an artifact or process is protected by Trade Secret s, reverse-engineering the artifact or process is often lawful as long as it is obtained legitimately. Patent s, on the other hand, need a public disclosure of an Invention , and therefore patented items do not necessarily have to be reverse engineered to be studied. One common motivation of reverse engineers is to determine whether a competitor's product contains Patent Infringement s or Copyright Infringement s. TYPES AND APPLICATIONS OF REVERSE ENGINEERING As Computer-aided Design has become more popular, reverse engineering has become a viable method to create a 3D virtual model of an existing physical part for use in 3D CAD , CAM , CAE and other software. The reverse engineering process involves measuring an object and then reconstructing it as a 3D model. The physical object can be measured using 3D Scanning technologies like CMMs , Laser Scanners , Structured Light Digitizer s or Computed Tomography . The measured data alone, usually represented as a Point Cloud , lacks topological information and is therefore often processed and modeled into a more usable format such as a triangular faced mesh, a set of NURBS surfaces or a CAD model. Applications like PolyWorks , Imageware, Rapidform or Geomagic are used to process the point clouds themselves into formats usable in other applications such as 3D CAD, CAM, CAE or visualization. Reverse engineering is often used by Military in order to copy other nations' Technology , devices or information, or parts of which, have been obtained by regular troops in the fields or by Intelligence operations. It was often used during the Second World War and the Cold War . Well-known examples from WWII include:
Reverse engineering software or hardware systems which is done for the purposes of Interoperability (for example, to support undocumented file formats or undocumented hardware peripherals), is mostly believed to be legal, though patent owners often contest this and attempt to stifle any reverse engineering of their products for any reason. On a related note, Black Box Testing in Software Engineering has a lot in common with reverse-engineering. The tester usually has the API , but his goals are to find bugs and undocumented features by bashing the product from outside. Other purposes of reverse engineering include security auditing, removal of copy protection (" Cracking "), circumvention of access restrictions often present in Consumer Electronics , customization of Embedded Systems (such as engine management systems), in-house repairs or retrofits, enabling of additional features on low-cost "crippled" hardware (such as some graphics card chipsets), or even mere satisfaction of curiosity. Reverse engineering is also used by businesses to bring existing physical geometry into digital product development environments, to make a digital 3D record of their own products or assess competitors' products. It is used to analyze, for instance, how a product works, what it does, what components it consists of, estimate costs, identify potential Patent infringement, etc. Value Engineering is a related activity also used by business. It involves deconstructing and analysing products, but the objective is to find opportunities for cost cutting. Finally, reverse engineering often is done because the documentation of a particular device has been lost (or was never written), and the person who built the thing is no longer working at the company. Integrated circuits often seem to have been designed on obsolete, proprietary systems, which means that the only way to incorporate the functionality into new technology is to reverse-engineer the existing chip and then re-design it. Reverse engineering of software The term "reverse engineering" as applied to software means different things to different people, prompting Chikofsky and Cross to write a paper researching the various uses and defining a Taxonomy . From their paper, : Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a subject system to create representations of the system at a higher level of | |||
|
|||
|
|