Reverse Engineering in Support of Litigation: Experiences in an Adversarial Environment

In this report, we detail our experiences in performing a reverse engineering task in an adversarial environment. When source code developers are required by law, but not by spirit, to permit their code to be reverse engineered, several factors increase in significance. Specifically, when examining source code to detect patent infringement on behalf of a plaintiff, examiners face a more challenging situation due to the actions of the defendants. We describe our experiences in such a situation and document the factors that aided and impeded the process