this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five

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Simplifying Complexity, One Answer at a Time!

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[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 3 points 1 year ago

Really depends on the kind of software and what exactly you're trying to reverse engineer.

If it's a software communicating via internet with something and you want to know what the communication looks like, you install another software that can catch all network traffic on your computer and look through the requests and their responses. Basically you do some action (like click a button) and watch the requests. From that you know what the button does and how to replicate it.

If you mean the source code of an app, I don't know that much about that, but I know you can decompile the software (which means you take the app and turn it into source code) which produces a horrible looking source you then go through and look for what you're interested in. But honestly, I don't have a deep knowledge of how it's done, definitely not enough to be explaining it to a 5yo.