What is reverse engineering and how common is it throughout the technology industry?
In: 8
Reverse Engineering is the process of pulling something apart and testing it to figure out how it works, for the purposes of making a copy of it.
This is very common practice in the industry, but the secret is knowing how to get around patents.
Patents protect companies from someone making an exact copy of your product or technology, but once they figure out how it works clever people are able to find a different way of doing the same thing that is different enough to get around your patent.
I once had a storage system on which a certain running service would sometimes die, and the only warning it would give you when it did was an error message when you started the control software. The manufacturer of the system would not provide any information on how to determine whether the thing was even properly running or not. One day, I got fed up and did some network traffic analysts, looking at what kind of transmissions were coming and going from the systems running the problem service, vs what was happening on the systems not running it. From that, I was able to determine how to remotely check whether the service was running properly. That is reverse engineering.
Almost anyone who repairs electronics does some amount of reverse engineering. You won’t always have a schematic handy, but following the traces around a circuit board to figure out what it does often works. That’s reverse engineering, even if you don’t intend to copy any of it, just understand and fix it. I enjoy doing this, both for repairs and for the challenge.
Engineering is figuring out a solution to a problem, reverse engineering is figuring out how other people solved this problem.
You can always fight the problem head on, but sometimes reverse engineering does help you coming up with your own solution instead of copying someone else’s, because now you know for a fact that this problem can be solved this way.
Latest Answers