#reverse-engineering

Robloquake is a project that ports the Quake engine to the Roblox platform, allowing the classic first-person shooter to run within Roblox. It implements Quake's rendering, gameplay, and level loading using Roblox's native capabilities.

A GitHub repository has reverse-engineered Google's reCAPTCHA system, detailing how the CAPTCHA challenge-response mechanism works internally and providing technical analysis of its operation.

The article provides a technical deep dive into the security flaws of Widevine L3 DRM, detailing how a vulnerability in the Lenovo TB-X306F tablet allowed the extraction of a device private key by exploiting an unauthenticated TrustZone app. This key could then be used to decrypt streaming video content, highlighting weaknesses in the L3 implementation.

The video showcases the Claw, a robotic gripper designed to handle flexible cables, attempting to pick up a 475-page paper datasheet. It demonstrates the robot's ability to grasp and manipulate large, floppy objects that would be challenging for traditional rigid grippers.

The article reverse-engineers token pricing of AI coding agent plans (Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Codeium). Pro plans are often 1.5–3× cheaper per token than buying the model directly, while Ultra plans can be 10× more expensive. It offers a framework for developers to compare plans objectively.

A developer reverse-engineered the Whoop 5.0 fitness tracker in 24 hours to make it work without a subscription, bypassing the company's mandatory monthly fee.

AnalystAIPack is a collection of 118 runnable agent skills designed to assist with malware analysis and reverse engineering tasks, providing automated capabilities for security researchers.

AnalystAIPack is an open-source pack of 118 runnable agent skills designed for malware analysis and reverse engineering, integrating with AnalystAIFramework to automate tasks like static analysis, dynamic analysis, and debugging.

SQLite Trace is a tool that extracts SQLite queries executed by any binary, enabling analysis of database interactions without source code access.

The article details how to reverse-engineer Codemasters' BIGF archive format and read its binary data using Ruby. It walks through parsing the file header, file entry table, and extracting embedded files from the proprietary container format.

The article describes a methodology for using large language models (LLMs) to reverse-engineer endpoint detection and response (EDR) products. It details how LLMs can assist in analyzing binaries, extracting configuration, and understanding detection logic, potentially lowering the barrier for security researchers to study proprietary endpoint security tools.

The article analyzes the Claude Code CLI binary (named "tengu"), documenting its inner workings, behavior, and functionality to provide transparency about what the proprietary binary does on a user's system.

The article details the technical process of extracting sound effects from a Nintendo Switch game, covering steps like locating audio files within the game's data, identifying file formats, and using various tools to convert them into listenable audio. The author describes their hands-on approach to reverse-engineering the game's audio assets.

A developer reverse-engineered the proprietary RLF (Raw Log Format) used by REMUS underwater drones and released an open-source reader. The project allows parsing and extracting data from the log files generated by these autonomous underwater vehicles.

Apple's Sparse Image Format (ASIF) is a disk image format for macOS/iOS snapshots. It stores only allocated blocks, leaving unallocated space sparse, enabling efficient large-image handling. This article dissects ASIF's header, block maps, and sparse region management compared to other Apple formats.

Decomp Academy is a free, interactive site teaching users to decompile PowerPC assembly from GameCube games into matching C. It uses a live Metrowerks CodeWarrior compiler and offers 250+ lessons, some from real games like Star Fox Adventures and Metroid Prime. The open-source project aims to help beginners contribute to decompilation projects.

Luma is a new open-source workspace for Frida, designed to unify reverse engineering and application instrumentation workflows across macOS, iOS, Linux, and Windows. It combines persistent workspaces, an interactive REPL, frida-trace, and collaboration features into a single application.

A developer reverse engineered the "Liquid Glass" icons from the upcoming visionOS 2 update, creating an open-source replica set called Decant that replicates the fluid, translucent aesthetic of Apple's new icon design language.

This repository documents the reverse engineering of the IBM MCGA (Multi-Color Graphics Array) gate array, including die photos, schematics, and analysis of its internal logic and functionality.

A developer investigated why Grand Theft Auto Online took up to six minutes to load, discovered a single-threaded CPU bottleneck caused by a 10MB JSON file being parsed inefficiently with O(n²) complexity, and published a fix that reduced loading times by 70% for many players.

The author reverse-engineered the Dreo ceiling fan's cloud-dependent RF remote protocol by capturing signals with an RTL-SDR, decoding the OOK modulation, and building a custom Arduino-based transmitter to control the fan locally without internet access.

OpenJTD is an open-source project aimed at reverse-engineering the file format of Ichitaro, a Japanese word processor. The project seeks to enable reading and converting .jtd and .jtdc files with open tools.

A developer has ported the Darksword exploit to WatchOS 10.6.2, enabling kernel read+write and process dumping for reverse engineering on Apple Watch. The tool is described as unstable and prone to panics, but restores capabilities not seen since WatchOS 4 with JelBrekTime.

Kinoko is an open-source C++ reimplementation of Mario Kart Wii's physics engine, aiming to recreate the game's original behavior and performance for research and modding purposes.

An open-source tool has been released that estimates prompts users might give to ChatGPT and other AI platforms based on a website's content. It crawls sites, analyzes keywords, and finds similar conversations in the WildChat dataset to reverse-engineer how brands are referenced in AI responses. The tool is aimed primarily at e-commerce stores looking to understand AI visibility.

The article explores how to use Claude Code, an AI coding assistant from Anthropic, to reverse-engineer CAN bus data from vehicles. It demonstrates using the AI to parse raw CAN logs, identify signals like speed and RPM, and generate Python scripts for decoding, effectively applying large language models to automotive hacking and diagnostics.

diffoscope is an open-source tool that recursively compares packages, archives, and directories to identify differences in their contents. It supports a wide range of file formats including Debian packages, RPM, ISO images, PDFs, and more, providing deep comparisons beyond simple file-level checks.

Revenant is an open-source toolkit that uses LLMs (Claude, OpenAI, local AI) together with reverse engineering tools like radare2 and Ghidra to automate firmware analysis, hardware bringup, and even replicate old firmware to resurrect legacy hardware using modern toolchains.

A die analysis of the Intel 8087 math coprocessor reveals how its fast bit shifter circuit, which could shift up to 31 bits in a single clock cycle, was implemented using a barrel shifter design. The article examines the chip's layout and circuitry to explain how this performance-critical component worked, contrasting it with slower iterative shift methods used in other processors of the era.

A Hacker News user is searching for a May blog post about reverse-engineering and emulating several obscure children's game consoles from the same company. The post detailed cheap hardware (stripped ARM, a 6502 variant), a VM inside the CPU, and a unique buffer feature for swapping drawing elements between cartridges.