eli5 – Backend Code

Question

Hello?

Can someone explain me with explain how we can not get windows backend code? I mean we reverse engineer all programs and config files in windows to watch what is used in backend

Then why it is said that We can not see backend coding of windows etc?

In: 0

Answer 1

Are you talking about the source code? Back-end is something else.

You can’t see the source code because it’s not freely available. It is possible to decompile a program, but making sense of the resulting decompiled code is difficult, as it is far less human-readable than the original source code, and lacks things like code comments, which programmers (ideally) use to make sense of what they’re looking at.

It’s sort of like trying to de-bake a cake. If you don’t know the original recipe, you could try to analyze the finished cake to try to figure out which ingredients were used, and in what order, but it’s gonna take a lot of time and skill to do so. And the “recipe” for windows is a hundred thousand times longer than a recipe for a cake.

The various config files you can see in windows is just a tiny piece of the puzzle. They don’t contain nearly enough information to let people easily figure out how things are done.

Now the *back end* is for example the code that controls your bank’s internet banking system. You’re displayed a web site, but your computer never gets to see any of the code that’s managing account transfers, etc. Those things happen on the back end and never leaves the bank’s servers, unless hackers manage to break in and steal it.

If you want to see the progress of reverse engineering windows, take a look at the Wine project. This is an open source project that aims to replicate how windows works without using actual windows source code. What they do is really cool, but they likely won’t every achieve perfect operation for every thinkable windows program.

What they do seems to be what you want to see. They look at what happens when windows runs a program, then they write their own windows-like code that, when receiving the same instructions from the windows program, give you the same result (hopefully) as if it was on windows.