What is Reverse Engineering and Why is it Important?

Why Do Companies Use Reverse Engineering?

In modern industries, reverse engineering helps a company to be competitive and innovative despite limitations in the proprietary systems.

Here are some ways companies can use reverse engineering.

• Recreate a long-discontinued product: Suppose a product’s manufacturer no longer exists (or the manufacturer decided to discontinue its production). To revive essential components of this product, a company can reverse engineer it through disassembly.
• Beat competitors: Reverse engineering can help a company spot weaknesses in a competitor’s products and leverage this knowledge to outperform them.
• Save production cost: Instead of developing products from scratch (which is usually costly), a company can reverse engineer an existing product to modify some of its certain aspects or functionalities to come up with a “new” product.
• Replace parts: Reverse engineering can help companies create component parts of a product. This is a great alternative when a manufacturer raises the price of some mechanical parts.

Reverse Engineering of Serial and USB Devices

A case where specialized tools are instrumental in the ability to reverse engineer a product or component is when working with serial and USB ports and devices. Going back to the concept of the “black box”, the primary inputs and outputs of serial and USB devices are streams of data that need to be analyzed in order to determine the component’s function. Reverse engineering of USB ports and devices demands a way to capture these data streams.

Without adequate tools to assist in this analysis, the reverse engineer would have to spend inordinate amounts of time to enact their analysis on USB and serial device and port activity. To properly reverse engineer USB devices and equipment of this type you need reverse engineering software tools that can help reverse engineers capture, analyze, and understand the communication protocols and data transmitted through these ports.

Importance of Dataflow Analysis in Reverse Engineering:

To understand how software interacts with a hardware device, one can reverse engineer the dataflow from COM ports.

For instance, if a technician wants to identify how a software program works with industrial sensors, he can examine the data packets sent and received by the sensor.

Tools for Reverse Engineering Serial/USB Ports:

To reverse engineer Serial or USB ports, you need a specialized third-party software that provides features and tools for this process. The two software applications ideal for this task are Serial Port Monitor and USB Analyzer, which are both developed by Electronic Team, Inc.

Let’s take a look at the features that these applications offer.

Serial Port Monitor

Serial Port Monitor is a full-featured utility for working with serial devices and ports.

Due to COM Port Monitor, you can connect to any serial port to begin sniffing immediately. This is true even for ports already in use by other applications. Data is captured in real time and presented in a variety of views to facilitate problem resolution. Your data can be sent to a file or the clipboard for further analysis at a later time.

Moreover, data sent and received from devices is recorded on a first-in-first-out basis for easier analysis and can be viewed in 4 ways such as a table, line, dump, and terminal views. Also, this tool fully supports the Modbus protocol.

USB Analyzer

USB Sniffer (USB Analyzer) includes many features that are required to perform USB reverse engineering tasks.

USB Analyzer lets you capture, save and export USB data - IRPs, URBs, IOCTLs, and data transferred through USB hubs are captured and can be saved in binary format or exported to plain text, CSV, XML or HTML. Being a tool made for analysis, the software monitors data in real time from the connected USB devices. That data can be collected as a raw hex dump or can be displayed as a decoded and readable text.

Advanced Reverse Engineering Tools

If you need to reverse engineer serial or USB ports under complex conditions, you can try these tools:

• Ghidra: Ghidra is an open source software reverse engineering (SRE) framework primarily used for binary analysis. This software can be useful when low-level analysis of device firmware driving the ports is necessary. Its decompiler can easily understand executable code linked to a port operation.
• Wireshark: Wireshark is extensively used for TCP or UDP protocol network communication analysis.This platform is highly useful when you need to reverse engineer data flowing through networked serial devices.

Reverse Engineering Use Cases

When it comes to IT systems and networks, reverse engineering tools offer a lot of potential uses such as:

• Determine communication protocol vulnerabilities: As you dissect data packets flowing over a network, you can pinpoint structural and content patterns that might pose security vulnerabilities to the network.
• Enhance device interoperability: Reverse engineering can help in determining data formats flowing through ports, enabling development of compatible interfaces for seamless interaction between devices.
• Understand undocumented communication protocols or proprietary technologies​: Some data packets flowing over a network follow a particular code that might be undocumented. Through reverse engineering, you can unravel the structure and logic of these codes.

Wrap Up

Reverse engineering data flow through COM or USB ports is still relevant, providing a great deal of applications in the field of cybersecurity, IoT, and complex IT ecosystems. With Serial Port Monitor and USB Analyzer, you can perform real-time reverse engineering with ease. Capture, save, and view serial port or USB data with their intuitive and clean interface.