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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

How feasible is it to go from doing software development to stuff like this for a living without a decrease in earning potential? I find reverse engineering interesting, but never really know who exactly is paying for stuff like this. Maybe this is more of a side gig?

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I've had a couple people trying to convince me to join Noblis for unrelated work. Saw these today as I browsed the listings:

https://jobs-noblis.icims.com/jobs/8246/junior-reverse-engin...

https://jobs-noblis.icims.com/jobs/6640/software-reverse-eng...

https://jobs-noblis.icims.com/jobs/6415/software-reverse-eng...

But in the past I've worked with malware analysts using IDA Pro to reverse engineer stuff. They worked for SAIC. That's another place to try.

> Must be able and willing to obtain a Top Secret security clearance.

I've had a confidential security clearance for years because of my job working on government military applications. I remember the process being insanely rigorous. I wonder how much longer it would take to get a Top Secret clearance?

In 2017 it took >18 months (I don't know how much greater, because I couldn't handle being paid to do busywork for so long). I would assume it takes longer for people farther along in their career (I was fresh), but would probably be faster because you've held a confidential.

Other anecdata: 60% of my cohort got a clearance in less than 8 months (I believe their sponsoring project paid for expediting?), at least one person was >3 years in queue last I checked.

Livelihood aside, how the heck do you go from being a dev to becoming proficient in reverse engineering? Are these stuff all self-taught through years of tinkering/interest before it becomes a profession?

I can already imagine the amount of technical barrier and knowledge gap one needs to fill even before getting started..

Holy shiet. It's impressive.

I do a bit of reverse engineering both professionally and for fun, and the two bits of “proper” education that have helped the most were my Hardware/Software Interface and Intro to Operating Systems classes in undergrad.

Learning how this stuff works in the forward direction makes spotting patterns a whole lot easier. It’s a lot easier to start RE when you’re already familiar with stuff like calling conventions or memory layout (for example).

From there, there isn’t a ton of formal education as far as I’ve seen. I am really fond of Smash the Stack’s IO wargame if you’re interested in CTF-style challenges. I also spent a good bit of time compiling my own small programs and then using them to learn the tools. When you’re starting off, RE is a lot easier when you know what you’re looking for.

I worked with some insanely smart individuals good at RE, and they describe it as a slog where you don't know how much, if any, progress one is making on REing something until you have a breakthrough. And then you don't know how much longer until the nest breakthrough. Ad infinitum. OTOH I know web app vulnerability researchers and they describe their job as going through the OWASP Top 10 and trying to find vulnerabilities. Sounds like the latter requires significantly fewer hard skills and you get more frequent intellectual reward.

If you want a better look at the basics I've found LiveOverflow on YouTube to be entertaining and fairly accessible for myself.

Fundamentally though, you will probably need to build up some low level knowledge of whatever you are targeting (whether it's an app platform, TCP packets, C/ASM code, etc).

If you have a web background there are lots of sites that have fun challenges you can start with. You could try Google's XSS game: https://xss-game.appspot.com/

It's a field that really interests me since I always liked puzzles and games and am happiest at work debugging tricky issues - but I'm not sure how easy it would be to break in as a 'junior' at age 35+.

You just start. Pick a layer and analyze. Run it through a debugger, analyze the network, etc.

Time in front of the screen is all you need. All code translates to an execution layer.

It helps if you have a few years of dev under your belt. Bonus for low level languages like C or assembly.

> how the heck do you go from being a dev to becoming proficient in reverse engineering?

have to do a lot of multi-system level debugging, and/or low-level debugging and optimization

Look for companies that make software that by has to integrate with existing/competing/legacy software systems.

I know that's vague but there are companies that make new products that for one reason or another need to talk to old products and the source, APIs, even binary interfaces are opaque, undocumented, obfuscated or otherwise unaccessible.

Developer tools, CAD/EDA, embedded systems... lots of people are building new stacks that have to talk to older ones at some point.

Getting into security might be a good starting point. I have recently started with Web-App security and Malware analysis. There is significant reverse engineering involved in these. You may apply to jobs once you're proficient.

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