Comment by FLeXMurphy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FLeXMurphy | Hacker News Reader

As a long-time RE this does not surprise me. It feels like an eternity ago that the MCPs for various reverse engineering tools dropped, but from the onset it seemed like a perfect fit. While we've had ML-assisted solutions before, nothing of this scale comes close, and as the recent Linux kernel presentation mentioned, a lot of it boils down to a massive effort-by-exhaustion and pattern-matching. This is the golden road for RE - if you know your compiler versions, processor arch, and you have something trained on countless permutations of different complexities, you're going to hit the right notes.

Yesterday's news on the mathematics breakthroughs were a foregone conclusion - there is a lot of hidden overlap between it and RE. RE is just the more obscure of the two, but among my circle of peers, many people have already undertaken (and succeeded) at very ambitious projects. Obvious standouts are things like Modern Warfare which gets mentioned because it is highly popular, but many games have already been reversed by the quiet majority.

I don't see many options for PS/Nintendo. Some form of bespoke-hardware-based lockdown reminiscent of the Cell processor, perhaps. But that is a lot of R&D to spend on something like this. Will have to wait and see.

So, what to make of this? Machines of the future or stochastic parrots? Of course. I'll take two.

I had my LLMs RE a sunsetted mobile game and within a few days ($10 equivalent of my monthly plan) replicate the fight screen with nearly perfect pixel by pixel animations and visual effects. Heavy use of ghidra and a MCP. Then it installed an android emulator to build an automated compare pipeline between the game and my remake. When I don’t feel like babysitting it, I tell it to spend some tokens on the long backlog of RE items and it happily churns away at it. It’s so easy and cheap, anyone can do this by themselves, for themselves. No need to wait for someone else to do it.

A swarm of humans with frontier models could probably rebuild many mobile games in a month. Only limiting factor is the lawyers. I’m somewhat surprised the models don’t have guardrails for this. They probably will soon enough, but by then the Chinese models will be good enough to do it. The dream is to have local models that can do it.

The option will be vexatious litigation to make some examples. It’ll probably work too, at least long enough for this whole AI reverse engineering transformation to piss off enough companies to lobby Congress to outlaw reverse engineering

I that's possible but I don't see how it can last since it conflicts with practically the entire constitution one way or another. I mean it's not a form of forcing you to house and feed a soldier, so clear there.

I don’t think the constitution protects reverse engineering. It’s just a couple court rulings from the 80s and 90s.

They basically did that with the DMCA. The most trivial code made to "Protect" the data on the disk and it's already violating the law to even try and look at the data before you can reverse engineer anything.

Basically, the reality that allowed the IBM PC clone market to happen and democratize computers for the masses doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah read to its extreme the DMCA abolishes personal property so long as it contains electronics. The electronics have copyrighted firmware or software, and any attempt to use them in any way the manufacturer deems unfit for any reason whatsoever is a felony. There is but one law: might makes right.

  > the DMCA abolishes personal property so long as it contains electronics

i think this is a good distinction: electronic _personal property_ is basically abolished while _private property_ (aka means of production) is strengthened and protected.

it really goes to show the balance of influence where law is used basically say 'corporations > people' (and this isn't the first time), which begs the question do we even live in a 'democracy' if thats the norm?

Wait did something happen with modern warfare?

It's been reversed a few times. From what I understand someone got ahold of the .pdb debugging artifacts early on and used it for the first reverse engineering project (both MW and MW2). This was -mostly- successful. More recently someone took all that work and ported it to Rust with some additional things. They now have Rust (the map) working in Bevy, a Rust-based game engine. You can find YT videos of it aplenty.

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