Column: File Cabinet Forensics

Reverse Engineering is the traditional bread-and-butter of digital forensics research. Companies like Microsoft and Apple deliver computational artifacts (operating systems, applications and phones) to the commercial market. These artifacts are bought and used by billions. Some have evil intent, and (if society is lucky), the computers end up in the hands of law enforcement. Unfortunately the original vendors rarely provide digital forensics tools that make their systems amenable to analysis by law enforcement. Hence the need for reverse engineering.