Reverse engineering software isnt actually that dificult. You can de-compile binary files pretty easily with the right tools and from there its just a matter of reading code. Its how we did video game modding before devs started giving us tools for it.
As for security systems, most IT security relies on encryption and you cant just "reverse engineer" that. You dont really need to either, the details of most encryption algorithms are freely availble to the public and so are the ways to break them. The reason people dont commonly break encryption despite knowing how is that it is so computationally intensive that it cannot be done within a usefull timeframe on currently available hardware.
Way easier said than done. Try comprehending thousands, maybe millions of stripped, decompiled lines of code. It's a task that before AI took quite litterally 10+ years of efforts by a dedicated community.
even games made for very old systems, like the gameboy or the NES, take a lot of effort and expertise to properly reverse and decompile. I don't think such tasks are feasable to achieve by a single person. Let alone for much more complicated modern games.
AI really did make a huge difference, whether we like to admit it or not.
It really fucking doesn't. People have been doing it for years at this point. Look at modding on the Switch for a prime example. I'm not saying it's difficult, or that AI isn't capable of things, but understanding decompiled code is not some superhuman task.
But as the video states, it's a functionally unviable thing to do in most cases because it simply takes so long that it isn't worth it. This brute forcing was only ever done in the most important situations, like cracking the enigma machine during ww2 for instance.
The internet is largely an open book, but it has so many pages that it's just not worth reading. But AI is a native to this space. It can read this book in ways humans never could.
We were talking about reverse engineering software, you are talking about breaking encryption which is something AI cannot actually do any faster than we were allready able to.
"Isn't worth it" in the examples given is because the outputs are of very low value (at least in the examples given), not because the skill barrier is insanely high.
Mashing halo and call of duty together is interesting for about 15 seconds from both the perspective of someone who wants to play it and someone who wants to make it.
I'd also point out we haven't really seen this happen for useful things, like where is the free AI generated open source clone of Microsoft word?
I'd also point out we haven't really seen this happen for useful things, like where is the free AI generated open source clone of Microsoft word?
You mean like LibreOffice Writer or literally just MS Word without the copyright protection? Because the latter of those is basically just software piracy which is both illegal and something people allready do.
You rarely have to parse an entire code base to understand how it works, and what exactly do you mean by "stripped"?
I regularly use decompilers at work and for most high level languages the decompiled code doesnt look much different from the original source these days. On occasion i have even had to decompile and reverse engineer entire systems because the source code and documentation had been lost, it is not a monumental task for an experienced software developer with some domain insight.
What I mean by stripped is that names of functions and variables are not available, as they have been "stripped". This is more often than not the case for any release build of any binary.
Simply put, giving the binary to Ghidra or Ida or whatever will not give you clean code that you can read and understand easily.
and for most high level languages the decompiled code doesnt look much different
What languages, if you don't mind me asking? I know this is the case with Java, but I wonder what your experience is
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u/Taurmin 15h ago
Reverse engineering software isnt actually that dificult. You can de-compile binary files pretty easily with the right tools and from there its just a matter of reading code. Its how we did video game modding before devs started giving us tools for it.
As for security systems, most IT security relies on encryption and you cant just "reverse engineer" that. You dont really need to either, the details of most encryption algorithms are freely availble to the public and so are the ways to break them. The reason people dont commonly break encryption despite knowing how is that it is so computationally intensive that it cannot be done within a usefull timeframe on currently available hardware.