Decompilers and Beyond

Disassemblers and debuggers are the two tools that allow reverse engineers to examine binary applications. Without them, binary codes are just sequences of hexadecimal numbers. Since humans are notoriously bad with digits, only superficial analysis can be done without these tools.

Basically, the job of a disassembler is very simple: it just maps hexadecimal numbers to instruction mnemonics. The output of such a basic disassembler is a listing with instructions. While this mapping is a big step forward and allows the user to decipher the logic of simple programs, it does not scale well. Analysis of any file bigger than a few kilobytes is problematic because instruction mnemonics are not enough to hold higher level information: labels and comments are needed, as well as facilities to change the representation on the fly.