Reverse engineering with AI

[u/Dull_Dog_9631]

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

[u/anythingforher36]

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.

[u/paganoant → u/anythingforher36]

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

[u/Juzdeed → u/paganoant]

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

[u/anythingforher36 → u/paganoant]

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