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NSA To Release a Free Reverse Engineering Tool (zdnet.com)
The US National Security Agency will release a free reverse engineering tool at the upcoming RSA security conference that will be held at the start of March, in San Francisco. From a report: The software's name is GHIDRA and in technical terms, is a disassembler, a piece of software that breaks down executable files into assembly code that can then be analyzed by humans. The NSA developed GHIDRA at the start of the 2000s, and for the past few years, it's been sharing it with other US government agencies that have cyber teams who need to look at the inner workings of malware strains or suspicious software. GHIDRA's existence was never a state secret, but the rest of the world learned about it in March 2017 when WikiLeaks published Vault7, a collection of internal documentation files that were allegedly stolen from the CIA's internal network. Those documents showed that the CIA was one of the agencies that had access to the tool.
I thought it was illegal to reverse engineer software?
No. Disassembling software is not, and has never been, illegal in America.
It may be illegal to use the result of the disassembly, especially to bypass security, but also by incorporating copyrighted or patented code into your own products, or accessing functionality that you are not licensed to use. But the disassembly itself is not illegal.
Some products have terms in their license that forbid disassembly, but those are untested by the courts, are only binding if you are a party to the contract, and violation is a civil tort, not a crime.
Eg Ndisasm
There are also a few tools that try to convert to high level languages:
Snowman
REC Decompiler