How do people reverse-engineer compiled applications to get the source code?

Question

I know the long answer to this question would probably be the equivalent of a college course, but can you summarise how tech people do this?

If you open game.exe with a text editor you’re just going to get what looks like a scrambled mess of characters, so how would one convert this into readable source code?

In: 5

Answer 1

You get a scrambled mess of characters because the text editor tries to decode the contents of the file as texy, which it isn’t. It’s like trying to read Chinese when you don’t know the language.

The contents of the file are (among other things) instructions written in machine code. You can view the file using a program called a “disassembler”, which converts these into assembly code. Assembly is basically a human readable equivalent of machine code – instead of a bunch of 0s and 1s, you get commands like ADD, MUL and JMP.