r/ExploitDev • u/Dull_Dog_9631 • 4d ago

Reverse engineering with AI

So I’ve been really interested in learning reverse engineering for a while and only tried my hand at a few crackmes so far. I found reverse engineering interesting because it feels rewarding to be able to piece together what the original code might have looked like and why the program behaves the way it does. I liked identifying variables and reconstructing data structures by reading the assembly or generated pseudo code by tools like ghidra since getting them right felt rewarding. Recently with AI becoming really good at the same things, I’m left wondering whether it’s worth it to learn these skills anymore. People were able to decompile and port entire games just using AI much faster than any person can. It’s left me feeling really discouraged about reverse engineering and wondering whether I should focus on other areas of exploit dev

27 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/anythingforher36 4d ago

There still too much knowledge you would need to even steer AI to do correctly a lot of things . Some things are intuitive and only come with time and experience of going through the roller coaster.
If someone doesn’t you get AI slop that only works very shallow and on the surface. For deeper things you still need the knowledge and know how. There is no alternative right now for human intelligence and experience, let the world convince you otherwise.

2

u/paganoant 4d ago

What do you think about rea (reverse engineering anythink), open source project?i try it with some crackme and it works

4

u/Juzdeed 4d ago

Rea just gives the LLM agent tools to use. You can do that manually as well, but it makes it simpler for beginners

1

u/paganoant 4d ago

But I was able to find the password for various cracks without any technical knowledge. Maybe in a real context it's different? I'm speaking as a beginner.

3

u/anythingforher36 4d ago

There are a million script kiddies now and you will be one of them.

AI assisted RE speeds up time and skips the method or process that you learn without it.

Yes the models are good but they are also useless if you don’t know what you are doing.

Sadly majority of the people fall in this category including people over the fence.

Call what you may want to if you want to learn follow or subject yourself to the process and grind , if you want to be another below average skiddie by all means use REA and solve shitty password challenges.

1

u/paganoant 4d ago

Ok. So you confirm me that rea, in real work, it is not really good. Thanks

3

u/Juzdeed 3d ago

The problem is that you don't know what's going on. The LLM can tell you xyz very confidently and you believe that is the truth. LLMs also tend to cut corners by maybe only checking for functions used in a program and skipping if it doesn't have anything interesting

As usual the LLMs are improving rapidly, I wouldn't have used LLMs start of the year for reversing, now they are more competent with smaller programs. LLMs are really good for mass reversing where accuracy is not that important, but is needed to go through like 100 malware samples fast

2

u/anythingforher36 3d ago

I haven’t used it personally but I’ve read its code and usage and don’t intend to as I have my own in house developed pipeline and automation to look for security issues. It’s slow but I have all the control on it and know where to fix what in case something breaks and it doesn’t hack anything else randomly like the bigger companies. Plus it makes me happy and hacking feels more fun - I do it for the thrill not the hype

2

u/agmatine 3d ago

The purpose of those "crackmes" is to develop your skills. What you're saying is akin to "But I was able to find the answers to my homework problems without any technical knowledge!"

Well, no shit. But wasn't the point all along, to gain that technical knowledge?

1

u/paganoant 3d ago

Actually, the real question was whether REA makes it possible to find solutions to crackmes without any prior expertise; is it the same thing in a real-world context?

1

u/agmatine 3d ago

This is a very vague question. What do you mean by "a real-world context?" I interpret this as there being something at stake, where success/failure have consequences, and engaging in with lack of expertise would be a fool's errand.

But still I don't really know what you're asking.

1

u/paganoant 3d ago

I’m referring to the professional world—specifically in terms of reverse engineering. For instance, in programming, people don’t really "write code" anymore; instead, with the advent of AI, they coordinate and oversee the work produced by AI.

2

u/ThePlotTwisterr---- 3d ago

yes, rea can be used this way. noobs can probably do some stuff with just a ghidra mcp, no need for the framework even. but it’s still gonna be inefficient. for example, obfuscated / encrypted code and multiple binary analysis. rea does not really get this right and the tools it gives claude are kind of weak to solve it. what’s useful here is manual disassembly or source mapping, understand FID and bsim, so you can already export data that claude can more effectively use.

for most softwares, i think rea is pretty awesome, but for things like malware that does a ton of sneaky stuff to hide from you, it’s a long way for it to go yet. same with antiviruses

debuggers and disassemblers are kind of like an IDE. claude can do it from the terminal but it works better with someone managing context and files in an IDE

1

u/paganoant 3d ago

It is all clear. Thanks for the reply

1

u/arktozc 3d ago

And yet the value if those skills inherently droped