The Barrier Between Source Code and Compiled Code Has Dissolved
calebfenton.substack.com
calebfenton.substack.com
The few thousand people worldwide who could reverse engineer binaries were the entire moat protecting IP, firmware security, and software as a discipline. That scarcity is gone.
just that some LLM calls it a moat or rare skill is nonsense. there are whole industries in which its normal dayjob for people to reverse engineer binaries let alone for the thousands upon thousands that graduate technical programs each year and can do proper RE. then ofc many thousands of hobby people who are likely some of the most sharp RE people out there.. huge communities reversing games, consoles, firmwares....
AI promoting AI
There are several products on the market that are automating reverse engineering. Think of what people do: they orchestrate tools, build tools, read code, run things in emulators / sandboxes. All of that can be done with an agent in the middle. Building the tools is hard, knowing how to use them is kind of hard.
If the code isn't obfuscated / packed / etc, claude code and a ghidra mcp server is better than most of the reverse engineers out there and way, way faster. You can work to get other tools in the mix for claude code.
Are models getting dumber or smarter? Is code getting easier or harder to write? The writing is on the wall.
Claude instructed by a highly skilled engineer might outperform a poor engineer, this is simple to see.
The innovation would be that claude guided by a shit engineer (or just a sales guy or my mom..) would outperfor a senior engineer. Senior in skills and experience, not title.
and RE is a vast field with an extreme wide skill tree. many of which skills are undocumented and not publicly shared,.using even tooling not available to these models...
its not just some dudes with ghidra lookin at firefox .. thats the rarer case :S