I wonder what to do about questions asking to bridge the semantic gap (e.g. reverse a file format without any binary). A lot of them are highly motivated, but sometimes it boils down to wild speculations
I also noticed a lot of people asking this questions seem to be pretty passionate about their topic and I think this is a good thing. However, maybe we should encourage to ask follow-up questions instead of expanding the question each time
if we replace "re this for me, here's the spec" with "code this for me, here's the requirements" then it would have been offtopic on StackOverflow without any efforts
I would say "close as unclear" if that is available here if there's not much to go on
Yes and on the other hand, questions like these have a serious impact on the percentage of answered questions, since they often do not provide the necessary information. But I fear that even if we get more blunt in the Help Center, if will hardly be read before posting
The second answer proposes to use the chat more frequently in situations like this. I tend to agree since @ws did a good job there today helping to patch a binary, which could have resulted in lots of follow-ups
@IgorSkochinsky we still need more questions and I would be curious about the outcome, but I can not judge how many people may actually be able to help there (I'm not)
@HamZa there is already a plenthora of ctf writeups. Even though I have a team and am on some challenges, noone would really like to explain everything a tenth time
Even if I did, I fear that it could be quiet pointless (no one who needs to ever reads anything)
That aside, there are some efforts to build up general ressources about reverse engineering and I think its great, but this site may not be the palce for it
@IgorSkochinsky Too much information is nearly as bad as too few infos, thats true :| didn't think about that particular problem with firmware
Did somebody here try BinaryNinja? I'm tempted to buy it for some hobby work at home
I like what they already got, but I fear the developers are in over their head (especially with regard to their own IR)
Vitaly Osipov comments "awesome work, although IMO it is better if this site does not become "do my reversing of me" site, but rather provides advice on how to tackle difficulties with reversing."
To which Geffner responds "My hope is to show people that for all these "figure out the checksum by looking at sample inputs and outputs" questions, you almost always need to reverse engineer the code itself. Expect me to point people to this answer (and this specific comment) going forward ;) "
@Nordwald You are right of course. What I was going to say is that based on what I have observed, it seems like it is generally more productive to analyze the program doing the encoding rather than focusing on analyzing the encoding itself. This question is like that
@SYS_V typically you get not guess an encoding / encryption scheme. The only reason I hesitate to vote to close these questions is that people are often quiet passionate about them (many edits / follow ups)
I especially like the first comment to the answer ;)
@Nordwald People may not realize how difficult cryptanalysis is and how important it is to provide as much context as they can. If people are truly interested in having their problems solved they should not withhold critical information. It's quite frustrating. In this particular question I was particularly baffled by the fact that he initially did not even say what the application was called! Getting more info should not have to be like pulling teeth
now that he provided more info I will update my post
Indeed its really strange he just came up with the product name. On the other hand, it is actively distributed and sold, so we (a) can not get a copy to look at and (b) may not be allowed to look at this copy. Honestly, this is more like a support question to this company
this scheme relies on interest. If no one is interested in developing and posting challenges, there won't be any challenges to solve. <- I think this is the main issue
Would it be ok to do something like create a reversing challenge/crackme binary, put a bounty on it an then post it, announcing it as a "reversing challenge"? The point would be to increase site participation, attract new users and give a rep bump to people with lower rep that actually took the time to solve the challenge. I could post a more formal description of what Im thinking about on the meta
There are practically no malware questions asked here
When it comes posting challenges on the meta, we could extend the window from 1 week to 1 month for example. The implementation would be a reflection of the reality of the situation here
@Nordwald the point is increasing participation with solvable challenges that are more interesting that what can be found in the graveyard of unanswerable questions here. But as Igor said, it is about interest. And who knows? maybe something like that may not benecessary. The average number of questions has increased from ~3.8 to ~4.4. Maybe this trend will continue...
Reverse Engineering
Reverse Engineering