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Reverse engineering is a complex process essential to software-security taskssuch as vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. Significant research andengineering effort has gone into developing tools to support reverse engineers.However, little work has been done to understand the way reverse engineersthink when analyzing programs, leaving tool developers to make interface designdecisions based only on intuition.  This paper takes a first step toward a better understanding of reverseengineers' processes, with the goal of producing insights for improvinginteraction design for reverse engineering tools. We present the results of asemi-structured, observational interview study of reverse engineers (N=16).Each observation investigated the questions reverse engineers ask as they probea program, how they answer these questions, and the decisions they makethroughout the reverse engineering process. From the interview responses, wedistill a model of the reverse engineering process, divided into three phases:overview, sub-component scanning, and focused experimentation. Each analysisphase's results feed the next as reverse engineers' mental representationsbecome more concrete. We find that reverse engineers typically use staticmethods in the first two phases, but dynamic methods in the final phase, withexperience playing large, but varying, roles in each phase. % and the role ofexperience varies between phases. Based on these results, we provide fiveinteraction design guidelines for reverse engineering tools.

An Observational Investigation of Reverse Engineers' Processes