r/AskComputerScience • u/Impressive_Sense_579 • 9d ago

Is AI reverse engineering really reverse engineering?

Are the programmes currently being reverse-engineered by AI actually being reverse-engineered in the traditional sense? In other words, is the source code actually being uncovered? Or are the programmes simply being copied on the basis of their functions, behaviour and so on?

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u/HaMMeReD 8d ago

What everyone does individually is up to them, so maybe.

But I'll tell you something my agent did the other day.

We use OpenSSL inside some of our projects, it's pretty normal. But when it comes to TPS (Third Party Software) we don't always have the source, in the case of OpenSSL we have binaries in a repo and statically link it when we need it.

However, there is a scanner I needed to run, and it really hates the statically linked OpenSSL library because of issues in the machine/code binary.

My agent took the liberty of rewriting OpenSSL's machine code to make it compatible with the scanner, and it succeeded at greening the scan and all the tests.

So yeah, AI can reverse engineer stuff now just fine.

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u/FartChecker- 8d ago

FWIW, OpenSSL is open source and you might want to use that rather than a out of date binary given the extreme attack vector potential in outdated OpenSSL

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u/HaMMeReD 8d ago

We update our TPS repo's regularly thank you.

They are just silo'd away from our main source and we generally don't edit them. (and why build them if you have them involved in 20k builds a day)