Can Reverse Engineering Help In Stopping Worms?

krozinov writes "The goal of this paper is to try to answer the following three questions: How do you reverse engineer a virus? Can reverse engineering a virus lead to better ways of detecting, preventing, and recovering from a virus and its future variants? Can reverse engineering be done more efficiently? The paper is organized into five sections and two appendixes. Section 1 is the introduction. Section 2 reviews basic x86 concepts, including registers, assembly, runtime data structures, and the stack. Section 3 gives a brief introduction to viruses, their history, and their types. Section 4 delves into the Beagle virus disassembly, including describing the techniques and resources used in this process as well as presenting a high level functional flow of the virus. Section 5 presents the conclusions of this research. Appendix A provides a detailed disassembly of the Beagle worm, while Appendix B presents the derived source code of the Beagle virus, as a result of this research."

Comments

The lawsuit is coming

[kuwan]

Now, just wait for the authors of the Beagle virus to slap them down with a lawsuit for reverse engineering their software. Something to the effect of:

"You have violated the License Agreement of the Beagle virus through your reverse engineering activities. Your publication illustrating how to do this is a clear violation of the DMCA and induces others to also violate their license agreement. Please Cease and Desist all such activities and prepare to see us in court."

--
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Legal?

[olddotter]

So is this legal under the DMCA? Someone just had to ask.