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Comment by z3phyr | Hacker News Reader

I really like this area of computer culture. RE, writing kernel modules, figuring out how stuff works and making stuff do what it was not designed to do aspects. However, legal avenues to do so are far in between and it requires a huge amount of time and help from peers.

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>However, legal avenues to do so are far in between and it requires a huge amount of time and help from peers.

I reverse engineer things for a living and I have many peers worldwide who do the same. My main field of work is malware analysis.

For recreation, in my country it's explicitly legal to reverse engineer things you own, with a purpose of making it work on your system (think: fixing a windows XP game so it works on windows 10). This is a very broad loophole, and let's you reverse engineer things in most cases when they "feel" like they should be legal.

This applies to the entire EEA, fortunately!

Can you maybe share more details, where I can read about this? Thanks!

Can you please share more details about the loophole you've mentioned?

Reversing for the purpose of integrations is commonly also legal.

Can you please also share more details, where I can read about this? Thanks!

You don't need a project to be "legal" to have some fun :)

Publish under a pseudonym with no links to your real identity, use dedicated communities that disregard DMCA takedowns. As long as you don't want to earn money this way, the worst that will happen is that your target notices your work and deploys vmprotect on their releases.

File formats are great fun to RE. I worked at a place that used a proprietary business management app. One day I was bored and started looking at its data files with a hex editor and saw some patterns like the titles of records in the app were spaced at exact multiples of X bytes apart on the data file. Oh! Fixed width records! Huh, look at that: right after the title, the next two bytes look like the hex value of the record number show in the app. Guess that's how it stores those! If I click this checkbox, this one byte changes from 0x00 to 0x01. Hey there! After enough experimentation I had the whole thing mapped to structs in code and was able to build reports that the original app couldn't support.

There wasn't anything illegal about that. I'm sure the vendor would've preferred we pay them to make reports for us but nothing legally prevented it.

Just don't publish it, and you can kinda do whatever. Remember, just because you build or learn something doesn't mean you have to broadcast it. Edification can be its own reward.

It's publishing what you've learned not ok?

If you've never done at least a tiny bit of "illegal" RE, are you even a true hacker? ;)

are there illegal schools teaching kernel module writing?

Yes. A silly example I encountered just yesterday, looking for usermodehelper invocation examples: https://gist.github.com/muratdemirtas/31b46c459c9c2e285ed71b...

Commenter asks:

> also, question: Why is it called linux_keylogger?

i don't see how that's illegal - it's only a crime if you install it on somebody's computer to steal their information. knives aren't illegal.

Yes, it's not literally illegal, otherwise Microsoft would be in even more trouble. I just thought it was amusing.

(but also, carrying sensibly sized knife is illegal where I live)

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