The 8 Best Reverse Engineering Tools In 2024

Reverse engineering is a process of analyzing and understanding the design of a product. The process is done by taking apart the product and analyzing its design, structure, and function. Reverse engineering tools are used to analyze the software or hardware that is being reverse engineered. They can be used to find bugs, extract data or code from an application, or find security vulnerabilities.

Reverse engineering tools are used to analyze the software or hardware that is being reverse engineered. They can be used to find bugs, extract data or code from an application, or find security vulnerabilities.

Reverse engineering is the process of extracting knowledge from a product in order to reproduce it. Reverse engineering tools are tools that help reverse engineers by making the process more efficient.

A reverse engineer is someone who takes apart a device, software, or appliance to see how it works and then tries to build one just like it. Reverse engineering tools can be used in many different ways: they can be used for software protection, hardware design, and even as a learning tool.

There are many different types of reverse engineering tools available online. One of the most popular ones is IDA Pro which is free and open source with a user-friendly interface.

Reverse engineering is a process of analyzing a system to understand how it works, and to make it work better. Reverse engineering tools are software that help us reverse engineer the code. There are many reverse engineering tools available online that offer free and paid options.

There are many benefits of using these tools. Some of them are:

They help you understand the code better as they provide detailed information about the code and its structure

They allow you to identify bugs in the code, which helps you fix them before they have any adverse effects on your product

It also helps you find out if there are any hidden features in the code that might be useful for your product

1. IDA Pro, Hex RaysIt

IDA Pro is a reverse engineering tool for a wide variety of executable formats. It’s well known for its interactive hex editor, scripting interface, and powerful reverse engineering capabilities.

IDA Pro provides powerful disassembler and debugger functionality, including the ability to dynamically explore a file in order to find patterns. It also has a built-in scripting language that provides sophisticated programming capabilities. IDA Pro has two main user interfaces: disassembling and debugging views.

The main advantage of IDA Pro is that it allows you to interactively change any element of the displayed data.

2. x64dbg

This is the new king of Windows debuggers. Ollydbg has been overthrown with this all new debugger. This one is compatible with all versions of Windows, including 32 and 64-bit software, and has plenty of plugins available as well as custom themes, which help make debugging software more pleasurable.

Website : https://x64dbg.com/

3. Hiew

Hiew is a great tool for reverse engineering. It has many features that make it stand out from other tools in the field and can be used to view and edit files in many different formats. This can be very helpful when trying to find vulnerabilities in code or data.

Hiew has many features that make it stand out from other reverse engineering tools in the field.

Hiew is a universal hex viewer and editor. It’s free, powerful tool for editing, viewing and converting files.

It can read any file format in the file system (even encrypted), including those that are not portable or have been modified by other editors. The program supports BIN/CMD/ELF formats as well as several others like TAR or GZIP compressed archives.

Hiew has many features such as syntax highlighting for C++ source code (C++11+), color schemes (256 colors), multiple undo levels, text selection with mouse drag & drop support etc..

Features :

• view and edit files of any length in text, hex, and decode modes
• x86-64 disassembler & assembler (AVX instructions include)
• physical & logical drive view & edit
• support for NE, LE, LX, PE/PE32+, ELF/ELF64(little-endian), Mach-O(little-endian), TE/TE64 executable formats
• support for Netware Loadable Modules like NLM, DSK, LAN,…
• following direct call/jmp instructions in any executable file with one touch
• pattern search in disassembler

• built-in simple 64bit decrypt/crypt system
• built-in powerful 64bit calculator
• block operations: read, write, fill, copy, move, insert, delete, crypt
• multifile search and replace
• keyboard macros
• unicode/utf8 support
• Hiew Extrenal Module (HEM) support
• ArmV6 disassembler

Website : http://www.hiew.ru/

4. Bytecode Viewer – Java decompiler

Bytecode Viewer is an advanced and powerful piece of software aimed to provide Java developers with the means to analyze, decompile and debug their tools, in order to determine the cause of certain issues or to further enhance them.

Features:

• Easy to use yet extremely effective.
• Written to run on Java 7, supports Java 8.
• Compile Decompiled Java classes with Ranino Compiler.
• Quickly decompile classes using JD-Core.
• Easily edit APKs via Smali/Baksmali integration.
• Java Decompiling with Six different decompilers (DJ-GUI/Core, Procyon, CFR, Fernflower, Krakatau, and JADX-Core).
• Bytecode Decompiling with CFIDE.
• Android APK integrated with Dex2Jar.

Securely launch Java applications and insert hooks via EZ-Injection.
Scan for malicious code with the Malicious Code Scanner plugin.
Export as DEX, Jar, Class, Zip or Java Source File.
Open Android APKs, Android DEX, Java Class Files and Java Jars. (WAR & JSP Support!)
* Extensively configurable, over 100+ settings!
Works seamlessly with all Operating Systems.
Integrate BCV into Windows by installing it, it’ll associate all .class, .dex and .apk to open with BCV.
View Jar & APK Resources with ease by APKTool.jar integration.
100% free and open sourced under GPL v3 CopyLeft.

Want a more in-depth article about BCV? Click here

Website – https://bytecodeviewer.com/

5. Wireshark

Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It’s used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Originally named Ethereal, the project was renamed Wireshark in May 2006 due to trademark issues.

developers of Wireshark responsible for overseeing the development of new features and maintaining stability. The program is cross-platform, using pcap to capture packets; it runs on Linux, macOS, BSD, Solaris operating systems; as well as some other UNIX-like operating systems including Microsoft Windows.

Features :

• Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time
• Live capture and offline analysis
• Standard three-pane packet browser
• Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others
• Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility
• The most powerful display filters in the industry
• Rich VoIP analysis
• Read/write many different capture file formats:

• Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly
• Live data can be read from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI, and others (depending on your platform)
• Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2
• Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis
• Output can be exported to XML, PostScript®, CSV, or plain text

Website – https://www.wireshark.org/

6. Process Monitor

Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, but also adds rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such as session IDs and user names into its data, reliable process information such as services that are running because of a process or thread’s actions, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation (Process Monitor supports WER), simultaneous logging to a text file and much more to the mix!

Features :

• More data captured for operation input and output parameters
• Non-destructive filters allow you to set filters without losing data
• Capture of thread stacks for each operation make it possible in many cases to identify the root cause of an operation
• Reliable capture of process details, including image path, command line, user and session ID
• Configurable and moveable columns for any event property
• Filters can be set for any data field, including fields not configured as columns
• Advanced logging architecture scales to tens of millions of captured events and gigabytes of log data

• Process tree tool shows relationship of all processes referenced in a trace
• Native log format preserves all data for loading in a different Process Monitor instance
• Process tooltip for easy viewing of process image information
• Detail tooltip allows convenient access to formatted data that doesn’t fit in the column
• Cancellable search
• Boot time logging of all operations

Website – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

7.  PEiD

PEiD is one of the best reverse engineering tools to detect the packer. By analyzing entropy, PEiD can detect whether an application is packed.

Features :

• PEiD detects most common packers, cryptors and compilers for PE files.
• It can currently detect more than 470 different signatures in PE files.
• It seems that the official website (www.peid.info) has been discontinued. Hence, the tool is no longer available from the official website but it still hosted on other sites.
• More details https://www.aldeid.com/wiki/PEiD

Website : https://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Packers-Crypters-Protectors/PEiD-updated.shtml

8. WinHex

WinHex is a hex editor that provides a rich set of features and development tools for Windows.  It can display checksums or code of software files, which is something a regular text editor is unable to do.

Features :

Basic Editing:

• Cut, Copy, Paste, Insert, Fill and Delete Hex
• ASCII, DOS, EBCDIC, Macintosh, Window, Unicode or custom character set filters
• Multilevel Undo and Redo
• Drag and Drop files onto Hex Workshop for quick editing
• Highlight hex and text sequences using Color Maps
• View modified bytes in user defined colors
• Select by offset/length or Select All
• Paste Special (any format on the clipboard)
• Insert File a file or replace selection with the contexts of a file
• Save a selection as a new file
• Select “Hex Edit” from Windows Right-Click Context Menu to view and edit files
• Context sensitive help
• View character distributions of a document or selection
• Copy document or selection as: C Source Array, Java Source Array, Hex String, HTML, RTF, Text, Base64 or UUEncoding
• View offsets and lengths in hex or decimal
• Integration with 3rd party applications
• User customizable keyboard shortcut key sequences for common operations

These are some of the best tools that reverse engineers frequently use when working on Windows reversing projects. As you can see, each of these reverse engineering software programs solves a very specific, unique set of problems.