Reverse Engineering is easier than ever - And I want you to try it
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Does REA use open or closed source AI models? I think the closed source models will come with restrictions soon, to prevent proprietary software from getting reverse-engineered
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@gotanidea It's open source. And no I don't think this is going to change. At all. The problem of course is there are local models which do exactly this. You don't even need internet to run REA. And its already the most popular repo on Github.
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@Daniel If reverse-engineering can't be stopped for locally installed software, I think developers will use streaming service as Google Stadia was or make a custom Virtual Machine (VM) to run their software with custom bytecode.
Instead of the software logic running on the user's CPU, the code runs on a virtual CPU and is translated via custom instruction set. When a user tries to decompile the software, he or she will get a bunch of stuff that doesn’t map to any known language or dataset. The hacker might not be able to read it, because he or she will get encrypted bytecode, custom instruction sets, no readable logic, no high-level structure, no variable or function names, no control flow graph, etc.
It would be interesting to hear the opinions of software developers such as @vectorstyler about these methods
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Decompiling is old-fashioned—that was before AI.
Nowadays, AI just needs to "observe" how a piece of software behaves,
and then it simply mimics that behavior.There are a few videos on YouTube that explain this.
"Sarcasm mode: ON"
What a fantastic time we live in! First, AI gets its hands on images, text,
and videos—only to sell them back to the user as the "latest thing,"
letting them believe they’re creating "art" themselves.
Now, it’s software’s turn.Maybe it’s still funny when it happens to Adobe—but what if your favorite software doesn’t survive?
Who would even want to develop software anymore if it can just be copied?
Oh, right—I get it: we’ll all just be able to do our own programming, won't we?
"Sarcasm mode: OFF"Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.
Win 11
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, 6-core.
GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 5070. -
@Subpath Decompilation existed before AI hype, but only exceptional hackers could manually decompile advanced proprietary software like Adobe's and Autodesk's. Nowadays, mediocre programmer can use REA and AI to recreate closed source software.
As for who would even want to develop software if it can just be copied, perhaps one of the two methods I mentioned above can be used to prevent the AI reverse engineering. If it works, software development business would survive
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@gotanidea: But this only works for what comes in the future. Not for already existing applications which already contains thousands of patents. They're all pretty much done for. There are so many millions of copies of cracked Adobe software in the market. And you also underestimate the sheer dogged persistence of black hatters. I used to write for a company called Dataminr.
A multimodal AI company. They're used by military organisations to listen in on public as well deep and dark web conversations to pick up threats. This was multimodal AI before it became sexy. Years ago. Now, every year they used to publish state of threat landscape report, and you'd see the sheer creativity of black hatters in that report. Constantly pivoting, evolving and innovating. Much of security is essentially just a reaction to their creativity. So, companies have opened the pandora's box with this one.
As I said the only legitimate response is to disallow the use of AI over ALL copyrighted material. That would mean even AI companies are boned. And they would never do that.
I think a different kind of catastrophe awaits the AI market: https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications/report-brace-for-impact-protecting-people-and-the-economy-when-the-ai-bubble-burst - This report is really good. Have a read.
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@Subpath said in Reverse Engineering is easier than ever - And I want you to try it:
Who would even want to develop software anymore if it can just be copied?
Oh, right—I get it: we’ll all just be able to do our own programming, won't we?
"Sarcasm mode: OFF"Copying is exactly how the market moves. The difference is how it is copied. For instance, I copied Bezigon from FreeHandMX. Right? I did so by exhaustively documenting screenshots of the tool behaviour, measuring painfully, and rewriting the algorithm. I wrote the spec for my friend. My friend, who is not a designer, wrote the code. Which I tested manually. This back and forth went on for months. With no breakthrough. Then we found out how the handles worked. Everything fell in place. This is a perfectly legitimate practice. Practically every company does it. Every.
In the process of copying it, I not only preserved Bezigon, I simplified it and made it far more intuitive. I brought the three node scheme under a two node scheme. This is how it is supposed to improve.
To your point about everyone coding: There was a time, for instance, when only extremely trained people could cut fonts. These were punch cutters who worked in foundries working with files for hours, days, and weeks on a single block. Then vector graphics came in. That old discipline of punch cutting - Gone overnight. Only boutique foundries do it today. There are millions of terrible fonts today. Made by dilettantes. Yet, people still license fonts from professional foundries, because everything said and done, font-making is still an extremely specialised and demanding field. Takes years to master.
As an instructive parallel, I want to point out that Ottoman Empire, arguably one of the wealthiest at that time, rejected the printing press because they valued calligraphy too much. The result? They'd not have a printing press for the next 400 years in Muslim heartland, until Napoleon took one to Egypt during his conquest. It was Muhammad Pasha's reform that eventually made Egypt a publishing powerhouse in Muslim world. Bulaq Press is still the premier publishing house in Egypt and traces back to Pasha's reform. The Muslim civilisation which led the scientific breakthrough fell far behind. Still hasn't recovered.
Point is, we should be careful what we say no to.
It is exactly the same parallel to coding with AI. Pretty soon the market will inundated with shitty software. It already is. But that will only make the contrast with actually good software even sharper. I don't for a second believe that this is fundamentally a bad idea.
@Subpath said in Reverse Engineering is easier than ever - And I want you to try it:
then it simply mimics that behavior.
Not quite. I spent time analysing the architecture of PhotoCraft, the AI generated Photoshop. It is not mere mimicry. I can tell you that. The architecture is genuinely elegant. The whole software fits in an 120 MB package. It is also extremely fast. Blazingly. The start up is in fractions of seconds. I am certain they decompiled code. But you're also underestimated how well AI is able to make simpler something as complex as Photoshop. This is not an endorsement of AI slop. But we must also be realistic with what we're dealing with here. Look, in the end it boils down to this: When google offered people free cloud storage, they eagerly took it. Right? That's where it all began.
In the cloud, ironically.
Cloud is just someone else's hard drive. Nothing more. Nothing less. When you were happy to store on cloud, you parted ways with your intellectual property.
My favourite Chinese saying: 騎虎難下 - Riding a tiger and not knowing how to get off!
We're clowns on the back of the tiger now. It is terrifying. But the alternative is devastating. So the solution is to brace yourself and ride the tiger.
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@Daniel said in Reverse Engineering is easier than ever - And I want you to try it:
Copying is exactly how the market moves. The difference is how it is copied. For instance, I copied Bezigon from FreeHandMX. Right? I did so by exhaustively documenting screenshots of the tool behaviour, measuring painfully, and rewriting the algorithm. I wrote the spec for my friend. My friend, who is not a designer, wrote the code. Which I tested manually. This back and forth went on for months. With no breakthrough. Then we found out how the handles worked. Everything fell in place. This is a perfectly legitimate practice. Practically every company does it. Every.
In the process of copying it, I not only preserved Bezigon, I simplified it and made it far more intuitive. I brought the three node scheme under a two node scheme. This is how it is supposed to improve.
To your point about everyone coding: There was a time, for instance, when only extremely trained people could cut fonts. These were punch cutters who worked in foundries working with files for hours, days, and weeks on a single block. Then vector graphics came in. That old discipline of punch cutting - Gone overnight. Only boutique foundries do it today. There are millions of terrible fonts today. Made by dilettantes. Yet, people still license fonts from professional foundries, because everything said and done, font-making is still an extremely specialised and demanding field. Takes years to master.
As an instructive parallel, I want to point out that Ottoman Empire, arguably one of the wealthiest at that time, rejected the printing press because they valued calligraphy too much. The result? They'd not have a printing press for the next 400 years in Muslim heartland, until Napoleon took one to Egypt during his conquest. It was Muhammad Pasha's reform that eventually made Egypt a publishing powerhouse in Muslim world. Bulaq Press is still the premier publishing house in Egypt and traces back to Pasha's reform. The Muslim civilisation which led the scientific breakthrough fell far behind. Still hasn't recovered.
Thanks for the interesting history. About the software protection methods, yes it will only work for future software. I believe Adobe is going under soon and the other huge software houses might follow suit if the hackers are determined enough to clone more complex products such as Unity, Unreal, Houdini, 3ds Max, etc. I heard from one of ArtCraft contributors that they're cloning Autodesk Maya.
As for the clones being slopware that only mimics the behaviors, I also don't agree with that statement, because VectorCraft and PdfCraft are much faster than Illustrator/ Affinity/ VectorStyler/ Inkscape and Acrobat Pro. The core of ArtCraft apps must be much better than the old software
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@gotanidea: Rust is a wonderful language. Because it essentially forces you to write clean code from the get go. Rust does not have a runtime garbage collector. Meaning your code won't even compile until it is completely clean. Seeing how elegant it is makes me want to start learning programming from scratch!
But that's one reason why Rust programs can be so good. Maybe one day VS can be migrated to Rust! Who knows what the future holds.
Graphite.art is already being written in Rust from scratch. It is the one project that can actually topple the house of cards for everyone. Because the vision behind it is great. It is not Adobe clone, but what Blender did to 3D, Graphite aims to do for 2D image, vector and DTP.
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@gotanidea said in Reverse Engineering is easier than ever - And I want you to try it:
I believe Adobe is going under soon and the other huge software houses might follow suit if the hackers are determined enough to clone more complex products such as Unity, Unreal, Houdini, 3ds Max, etc. I heard from one of ArtCraft contributors that they're cloning Autodesk Maya.
Not really. Simply cloned software can take away the consumer market income from these companies. But enterprises will continue to use them. Because OpenSource not backed by enterprise brings a ton of security risks for companies.
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I just opened YouTube and these two videos came up.
I wasn’t looking for them at all—they were the very first things that appeared.Both videos are in German, but you can enable English subtitles.
First video:
"Why indie developers are now hiding their games"Second video:
"STEAM is currently being flooded with AI!" -
@Subpath I will look into them. But just to reiterate. I am not suggesting that this flood of AI is good. But I am also disinclined from writing it off. There's a middle road here. Maybe it is razor sharp. But still.
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@Daniel
As I have already written, I have no problem with differing points of view—
after all, that is precisely what discussions are for. I didn't assume that you
approve of everything, either.For me, too, AI certainly has its place—I am thinking more in terms of fields
like medicine and science. In my view, however, the current hype surrounding AI
overlooks far too much, in my eyes. -
@Subpath: Agreed! The hype is a bit much. Higgsfield did get trashed though! As designers, we can be happy about that!
