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Comment by zuzululu | Hacker News Reader

what are some stuff that people are interested in reverse engineering ? ive never done it before but recently got interested after people started porting mario 64 to the playstation.

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> what are some stuff that people are interested in reverse engineering ?

Software license/key verification. Sometimes it’s as easy as replacing a “JNE” with a “JE”, or replacing “JMP”, or even just “NOP” some “CMP” operation. It’s a fun challenge, at least for people who enjoy solving puzzles.

yeah i remember those days warez, crackers, keygen using regedit to try bypass trials thats a pretty neat use case i hadn't thought of

anything that has a 'not very good' app you are forced to use, everything that imposes 'licensing' limit on hardware you own.

e.g. why do I need V380 app to configure and watch the feed of my IP Camera.

i think this is genuinely something i will do. so many products from china come with these really sketchy software looks like it was made in the 90s

Various devices that I don't want to install the official software or drivers to control. I've done this with several things, but just as an example I have a MIDI MPC pad (the sort of thing samplers/beat makers use) and worked out it had various features not supported officially like controlling the lights on the pads. I also discovered some cheap Chinese lights my daughter owns are controllable over BLE without encryption.

I started with Lineage 2 - RE the network protocol, building own implementation that could communicate to the server, than fighting with protected binaries (anti-VM, anti-debug). That was interesting.

One thing that I tried was porting an old and obscure 32-bit VST plugin from PowerPC to modern architectures

OBD vehicle diagnostic software.

thats a good one. even better if ya open source it ;)

FreeSSM is already open source. It's reversed Subaru SSM diagnostic protocol and wrapped a tool around it. That was ~15 years ago, long before any of the AI stuff.

The point was rather that reverse engineering the CAN-bus protocol or existing software that already does it for your vehicle of interest is now by far easier through the usage of AI models than it was before - FWIW I could have done it before with the technical skills I have but ROI for me personally was too low. Now I am really considering it.

Oh, yeah. Agree with that point.

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