Reverse engineering: Validity and Legality
Reverse engineering
The discussion about the validity and legality of this practice
Summary
This article addresses the controversial role of reverse engineering in the computer industry, among others. To do this, we borrow examples from the software industry, high-tech hardware production and the pharmaceutical industry, all these practical examples of the advantages and disadvantages of using this questionable practice.
Introduction
It should be noted, in the first instance, the determination of the concept of reverse engineering, its most significant practices and results. Reverse engineering aims to appropriate new strategy concepts from the deconstruction of ready models.
This practice can be considered as the process of analyzing a physical or virtual product, such as devices, computer programs, or even business models, understanding the details of its operation, usually with the intention of building a "clone" with it function, without effectively copying anything from the original.
Objectively, reverse engineering consists of, for example, disassembling a machine or capturing a computer program to discover how it works.
Reverse Engineering Services in the case of hardware, requires a much higher level of knowledge, and is much more expensive than that of software. A manufacturer, for example, if he wants to know how the competitor's processor works, can buy it, reverse engineer and create a similar processor. In general, reverse hardware engineering uses electronic measurement tools, such as a multi-meter, oscilloscope and a device programmer. ”
On the one hand, we can glimpse immense progress in the basification of the use of technologies that were initiated by the use of reverse engineering as an initial point of scale production, citing here the classic case of the creation of the first compatible personal computer on the market by Compaq, which used reverse engineering on the equipment originally manufactured by IBM.
On the other hand, this practice is also placed at the service of the so-called "cracker culture" and its harmful practices for the consumer society, for the right to intellectual property and for the right to authorship. In this article, we will use the term 'cracker', as the individual belonging to a specific community of programmers, also known as ‘hackers’; however, their intentions tend to activities considered illegal in the community where they act. It is important to discriminate more clearly the individuals acting in the development community of the so-called 'free software' or ' open-source'. They arrange their knowledge for technological development, developing new functions to pre-existing systems or creating new systems and are known as hacker. In contrast, there is the individual who, most of the time, is treated as an outcast by this community, since he generally puts his powers at the service of a petty and questionable ethics project, by creating malicious systems legally and morally violating cyber systems, These individuals are the crackers.
The discussion, raised here, regarding the positive and negative aspects resulting from the application of reverse engineering, may throw a new light on the moral, ethical and legal limits of this practice and alert developers of computer systems on how to prevent against this practice.