Dropbox reverse engineering an omen for software industry

August 28, 2013

The risks of relying on the cloud have been discussed at length, but security researchers are about to add a new danger that users will soon have to worry about: Reverse engineering the software directly. In a new paper, “Looking inside the (Drop) box” [PDF], security pros Dhiru Kholia and Przemysław Wegrzyn outline in painstaking detail the steps they took to successfully decode the program that makes up the Dropbox user client, essentially opening it (and their would-be victims’ accounts) up for direct attack. Reverse engineering is not a malicious attack, per se, but is rather a long-standing technique used to take a peek under the hood of any high-tech product, typically a piece of hardware. Reverse engineering of software has become more popular in recent years, as well, with original developers and reverse engineers continually one-upping each other in an attempt to protect their code or to expose it, respectively. Judging by the near-daily headlines, computer security is not improving. The ease of bypassing that security, however, is. On the developer side, various terms are used to describe this. Applications that the developers are attempting to protect are called hardened or obfuscated. These techniques are used when a developer doesn’t want to open his code base for analysis, review, attack, or (more to the point) outright copying by others. (This is the antithesis of open source programming.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047639/dropbox-reverse-engineering-an-omen-for-software-industry.html#tk.rss_all