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Comment by jasim | Hacker News Reader

As a kid fumbling around proprietary Windows binaries, I felt liberated by the ideas of Fravia and +ORC. They taught me that I deserve to know what goes on underneath the software I use. Softice, IDA and w32dasm were the tools of the trade. But most of it were limited to finding where the MessageBox with the trial message pops up and reversing the conditional jump just before it. Here is a small tutorial teaching how to reverse and remove the trial limitation of an ancient version of UltraEdit : http://71.6.196.237/fravia/uedilas.htm

But after switching to a fully opensource stack, reverse engineering lost its charm. Understanding how things work is taken for granted and I can't imagine going back to an opaque proprietary environment.

Fravia passed away on 2009; but his archives are preserved here: http://71.6.196.237/fravia/index.htm

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What you link to is Fravia+ previous project, more focused on software reverse engineering - http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/.

Fravia+'s last project - "Web Searchlores" was/is more aimed towards general reverse engineering and information searching. The site contains a huge collection of information, which curiously, although not updated for so many years, is still relevant today.pparently searchlores.org and fravia.com have expired and are "parked" by sombody. But looks like http://search.lores.eu/ is the only remaining official mirror that remains from

What you say about the F/OSS certainly rings true, but at least for me, software reverse engineering has always been more as a training ground for reversing in general than to cracking software copy protections.

+greythorne has stopped updating his pages and +HCU's Linux infor, but mammon_ is pretty active, and even moved to Github: http://mammon.github.io/ . Definitely worth checking out for more information about Software RE under GNU/Linux.

Nowadays there are a lot of opaque software in widespread use, so the main focus has shifted towards web platforms, where reversing is still applicable.

edit: style

> although not updated for so many years, is still relevant today.pparently searchlores.org and fravia.com have expired and are "parked" by sombody. But looks like http://search.lores.eu/ is the only remaining official mirror that remains from

Fravia died a few years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

For people interested in reversing I recommend to engage on the new http://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/ and the "classic" http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/

One issue with reverse engineering information/community is the lack of organization. There are a lot of web resources about it but are not well interlinked (yes, the <a> tag). So, it is possible that a great tool is hidden in a page with low page rank. OpenRCE was successful in the past but nowadays people don't use it.

>Fravia died a few years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

Yes, but 4 years are a considerable time on the web. Linkrot to and in some of the external resources can be felt.

That's also my story. I spent countless hours reverse engineering software but stopped after going Linux-only. In fact I realized that reverse engineering was the only reason I'd been using Windows for a very long time.

I also remember many wonderful tools like PEiD (locating and identifying hash functions), hiew (hexeditor), RSATool (RSA cracking tool), FSG (file compressor). There was also OllyDbg and it seems that it's still actively developed.

Ah, memories.

Oh man, OllyDbg was excellent. I was never great at reverse-engineering, it was mostly a "change random jmps and hope it works" thing for me, but it was exciting. Nobody I knew had credit cards back then, and I was a teenager, so I couldn't pay anyway, but I'd get shareware I don't use just to see if I can crack them. I'd delete them afterwards.

I once created an "uncrackable" crackme (in Visual Basic 4, no less!) that had a part of its code encrypted with RC4, and the license key was the decryption ley.

I feel that I need to add Phrozen Crews' TKC tutorials ( http://www.woodmann.com/RCE-CD-SITES/Quantico/lessonstutors.... ). Those are the ones that I used to learn cracking.

Fun times. I remember the two best cracks I read about: One was to add functionality to binary software (the tut was to add something to Notepad). This was used to 'crack' w32dasm and add some other stuff (there were really cool w32dasm versions circulating).

The other was (and it is funny that is still quite relevant e.g. SimCity) to emulate a validation server (I think it was Flex validation) in localhost to register software that called home.

My personal best was to do keygens. For that, you really needed to understand the asm program routine which validated the username/pass.

I went through the same process. Fravia and the +HCU fostered my curiosity and made me want to know more and more about the inner workings of software. Not only that, Fravia was a man of learning, essays on the +HCU/SearchLores.org were often a philosophical pretext to discuss subjects beyond reverse engineering. I miss the man and I regret not having been able to meet him in person.

Yeah I loved those "back in the day". I've never been good at reversing stuff but there is a certain zen-like quality that I appreciate about the process :)

Has anyone ever figured out who +orc was/is? That was one of the fun riddles of the day :)

Wow that Fravia link brings me back a few years

may I ask what is your fully opensource stack?

This is a bad answer, but when I'm on Linux, I use objdump and gdb for most of my reversing. They don't really compare to IDA, though. xxd is fine for hex editing, especially in the context of simple conditional jump changing, although there are much better open source hex editors.

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