reverse engineering

system, product, design The process of analysing an existing

system to identify its components and their interrelationships

and create representations of the system in another form or at

a higher level of abstraction. Reverse engineering is usually

undertaken in order to redesign the system for better

maintainability or to produce a copy of a system without

access to the design from which it was originally produced.

For example, one might take the executable code of a

computer program, run it to study how it behaved with

different input and then attempt to write a program oneself

which behaved identically (or better). An integratedcircuit might also be reverse engineered by an unscrupulous

company wishing to make unlicensed copies of a popular chip.

(1995-10-06)