3 ms·
You underestimate the cost of a competent reverse engineer's time. eg: I charge $995/hour for such stuff (reverse engineering unknown chips/devices) and have no
by dmitrygr 5y ago
You underestimate the cost of a competent reverse engineer's time. eg: I charge $995/hour for such stuff (reverse engineering unknown chips/devices) and have no shortage of takers.
A large amount of initial RE work is research, such as this article. Not doing it costs you a lot more time later on.
Working code could easily be over 100 hours of work on an under-documented radio chip, so your cost estimate is too low for that
- stagger87 5y agoGenuine curiosity, who is paying for that type of work? What is a typical use case? Where is the ROI? I'm not familiar with this world at all. I appreciate any insight!
- dmitrygr 5y agoSome companies want to know how their competitors do things. Some companies want to find how someone would RE their devices, so they pay someone to find a way, then tell them. Sometimes just a random person will want something REd so much that they'd pay for it to be done (happened more than once) Sometimes no cause is given to me, which is fine because that is none of my business, really. Sometimes I just do it for fun, but then I do not get paid, eg: http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=30.%20Reverse%20Engineering%20an%20Unknown%20Microcontroller http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=30.%20Reverse%20Enginee...
- megous 5y agoI know how much re costs in the amount of time spent. I've RE'd all kinds of things, and re-implemented in a better way, from weird payment terminals, camera sensors, to really weird eInk/SoC combos where a big manufacturer is bitbanging eInk protocol over data lines of LCD interface from memory patterns, USB bootloader protocols, software protection schemes... Pre-RE research is valuable, but that's just a start. Anyway, at $200/h you can spend 500h making something work. ;)