3 ms·

Reminds me of that time when they fixed a buffer overflow in the ancient Office Equation Editor by manually patching the binary because they lost the source cod

• jplayer01 7y ago
  Wow, that's impressive.
• Kipters 7y ago
  Are are more explanations for the manual patch than losing the source code though: why spend days/weeks setting up a 20-year old dev and build environment when a two-byte patch does the trick?
• mrpippy 7y ago
  It’s worth noting that a patch around 2 months later removed the Equation Editor entirely, because more security issues were found and binary patching wasn’t going to be sufficient.
• ohlookabird 7y ago
  Oh that reminds me of learning some assembler by writing cracks to shareware programs to patch away test period warnings, license key checks, etc. using a disassembler (w32dasm I believe) on the binary executable. That was a fun learning experience, helped a 14 year old to use software he otherwise couldn't buy (me) and helped understanding quite a few internals of binaries.
  • anticensor 7y ago
    Some binaries are obfuscated by overlapping several routines together.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      Oh, there's a bunch of ways you can try to make reverse engineering harder, but I don't think these techniques are really that common for most software.