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Out of curiosity what kind of job involves doing binary reverse engineering full time?
by in_hindsight 8y ago
Out of curiosity what kind of job involves doing binary reverse engineering full time?
- bpye 8y agoRed team?
- lowpro 8y agoIf your Red team is reversing binaries you’re doing it wrong.
- bencoder 8y agoWhy? If your real world adversaries can reverse binaries, why would you shackle a Red team from doing so?
- neckardt 8y agoBecause they have access to the source code itself. No need to reverse engineer anything.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoCouldn't compilation introduce vulnerabilities that wouldn't be in the source, but could be found by decompilation?
- andrewnicolalde 8y agoShort answer is yes.
- SCHiM 8y agoThat depends on your definition. Many people, myself included, take 'red team' to mean -> attack simulation. If you have access to source, it implies a white box test, which is not an attack simulation but 'ordinary' vulnerability research. The concrete difference between the two is that vulnerability research is mostly focused on the technical security aspects. Eg. is there a buffer overflow here yes or no? From an efficiency perspective it makes no sense to hide the source code or even credentials from the pentesters performing this research. An attack simulation is more holistic in nature, the question becomes "can your security team detect when we exploit this buffer overflow?". The blue team and the red team do not share details, and to give the blue team a proper exercise they are often not even informed. To do a proper red team exercise the scope must be very broad. Both technical controls as well as procedural operations are in scope. If you call application/network security research a red team exercise I think you're doing it wrong. So a red team, in the sense of the word that I specified, does not have access source code, and most definitively sometimes needs to reverse engineer binaries.
- bluesign 8y agoBecause they should use the source.
- lowpro 8y agoBecause although you don't have source code (like other commenters are saying), reversing a program to get into a company would be the hardest way to go. Red teams are used to test a company's overall security, and reversing normally wouldn't make sense compared to phishing, using common exploits, and owning the network. Reversing binaries is not the job of a red team, but pentesters of specific systems.
- PeterisP 8y agoRed teaming isn't limited to "get into a company" testing of networks, it's also used for testing products and infrastructure that's outside the company. For example, you can reasonably have a red team evaluation of some authentication or payment infrastructure based on smartcards or mobile apps, and that'd inevitably include reverse engineering of all the artifacts that are available to the users; and in such cases also likely that many/most software parts of "your" product or device aren't made by you but redistributed from some other vendor, and you don't necessarily have the source available for that.
- Godel_unicode 8y agoMalware analyst, vulnerability research
- FBISurveillance 8y agoA job at NSA, for instance.
- philpem 8y agoReverse engineering the firmware for an embedded product where someone lost the source code. Bonus points available for: * "the source control is ZIP files on a network share" * "yeah we use forced squash commits on everything to keep the Git history nice and linear" * "it was designed by a contractor who is now uncontactable"
- auiya 8y agoChinese software dev firms.
- souprock 8y agoWell there are these, at my workplace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183 That includes malware analysis, vulnerability research, and emulator development.
- nunobrito 8y agoAudits for Intellectual Property. Too often companies pay 6 digits for a feature that some supplier rips directly from an open source on the Internet (often GPL) and then sells as his own.