An observational investigation of reverse engineers' processes and mental models

Daniel Votipka; Seth Rabin; Kristopher Micinski; Jeffrey S. Foster; Michelle L. Mazurek

doi:10.1145/3290607.3313040

An observational investigation of reverse engineers' processes and mental models

Daniel Votipka, Seth Rabin, Kristopher Micinski, Jeffrey S. Foster, Michelle L. Mazurek

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/Poem › Conference contribution

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Reverse engineering is a complex task essential to several software security jobs like vulnerability discovery and malware analysis [14]. While traditional program comprehension tasks (e.g., program maintenance or debugging) have been thoroughly studied [2, 9, 10], reverse engineering diverges from these tasks as reverse engineers do not have access to developers, source code, comments, or internal documentation. Further, reverse engineers often have to overcome countermeasures employed by the developer to make the task harder (e.g., symbol stripping, packing, obfuscation).

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	CHI EA 2019 - Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450359719
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3313040
State	Published - May 2 2019
Externally published	Yes
Event	2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA 2019 - Glasgow, United Kingdom Duration: May 4 2019 → May 9 2019

Publication series

Name	Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference	2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA 2019
Country/Territory	United Kingdom
City	Glasgow
Period	5/4/19 → 5/9/19

Keywords

Program Comprehension
Reverse Engineering

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

Access to Document

10.1145/3290607.3313040

Cite this

Votipka, D., Rabin, S., Micinski, K., Foster, J. S., & Mazurek, M. L. (2019). An observational investigation of reverse engineers' processes and mental models. In CHI EA 2019 - Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Article 3313040 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3313040

An observational investigation of reverse engineers' processes and mental models. / Votipka, Daniel; Rabin, Seth; Micinski, Kristopher et al.
CHI EA 2019 - Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, 2019. 3313040 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/Poem › Conference contribution

Votipka, D, Rabin, S, Micinski, K, Foster, JS & Mazurek, ML 2019, An observational investigation of reverse engineers' processes and mental models. in CHI EA 2019 - Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 3313040, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, Association for Computing Machinery, 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA 2019, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 5/4/19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3313040

Votipka D, Rabin S, Micinski K, Foster JS, Mazurek ML. An observational investigation of reverse engineers' processes and mental models. In CHI EA 2019 - Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery. 2019. 3313040. (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings). doi: 10.1145/3290607.3313040

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An observational investigation of reverse engineers' processes and mental models

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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