"Virginia Tech Researchers Find Vulnerabilities in Code of Popular Reverse Engineering Tools"
Using mathematical principles to understand the behavior of code, a team of Virginia Tech researchers discovered that the source code in popular reverse engineering tools such as Ghidra may not be as secure as its creators intended. Through their mathematical proofs, software programmers can ensure their code does not experience unintended behaviors that hackers find appealing. Security professionals typically assess a program by testing its machine code. This machine code, which consists of a series of zeros and ones, is what a computer executes. However, the code can be difficult for humans to understand, particularly in the absence of the original source code used to develop the machine code. Using reverse engineering tools, these long and difficult-to-decipher numerical lines of information can be translated into source code much closer to spoken language, thus enabling security professionals to see what is actually happening in the binary code. Unfortunately, these tools may overlook important machine code behaviors, especially those that were not intended by the original programmers who wrote the source code, allowing hackers to find vulnerabilities. This article continues to discuss the team's discovery of vulnerabilities in the code of popular reverse engineering tools.