wololo.net/talk

That was probably a bad title but it's a very general question and that was the best I could think... My question is: Theoretically, can anything be retrieved from RAM? If yes, doesn't this mean that anything that can be executed is vulnerable to reverse-engineering (or if it is artwork, steeling)?

Nickolas wrote:Theoretically, can anything be retrieved from RAM?

Without theoretically.

Nickolas wrote: If yes, doesn't this mean that anything that can be executed is vulnerable to reverse-engineering (or if it is artwork, steeling)?

Yes. That doesn't mean RE it will be easy (check polymorphic code for example). And please don't confuse RE with stealing.

I didn't mean to offend reverse engineers, it's definitely not stealing. Thanks for answering Does this work for any RAM in any device? Were I to reverse engineer an iPhone app for example would I be able to dump the memory and find the app's address?

I have a question about RE in general: is it legal to RE a program that has no license specified, make the resulting source code public, and base a different program on it?

Nickolas wrote:Does this work for any RAM in any device?

For any Von Neumann's architecture-based device (which are 99.999999%), yes.

Nickolas wrote:Were I to reverse engineer an iPhone app for example would I be able to dump the memory and find the app's address?

The point is being able to dump the memory region you want. The own application addresses are easily known. The problem is accessing memory regions your program has no right to.

Xian Nox wrote:is it legal to RE a program that has no license specified, make the resulting source code public, and base a different program on it?

If it has no license specified (which is rare) then yes.