SECAI Core · phase 11 of 15 · noun
Reverse engineering
The process of analyzing the structure of hardware or software to reveal more about how it functions.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- Reverse engineering means analyzing hardware or software to work out how it functions, without the original design documents or source code.
- Example
- A researcher pulls apart a mobile app to recover the embedded API keys and the system prompt it sends to a hosted LLM, then reuses those to call the model directly.
- Why it matters
- Anything shipped to a client can be taken apart: model files, prompts, and keys included. Defenders assume disclosure and keep secrets server-side, while also using reverse engineering themselves to analyze malware.
- Hook
- Taking the clock apart to see what makes it tick.
Word knowledge
How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.
In a sentence
The security team used reverse engineering to inspect a compiled model-serving binary and trace untrusted prompt data to an unsafe system call.
Why these words
- reverse Old French revers, from Latin reversus, turned back marks a direction from the finished system back toward its design
- engineering engineer plus -ing, with engineer influenced by French ingénieur names the technical activity whose usual direction is reversed
Where it came from
- Origin
- An English compound combining reverse with engineering; reverse traces to Latin reversus, while engineering ultimately traces through French to Latin ingenium
- Entered the language
- c. 1960
- What changed
- Engineering originally emphasized designing and constructing, while the compound applied that work in the opposite direction, beginning with an existing artifact
How it is spelled
- Pattern
- The noun is normally written as two open words
- Pattern
- Engineering preserves the complete spelling of engineer before -ing
Spelled like
- forward engineering
- software engineering
- systems engineering
- pioneering
Broken into chunks
-
vers
- inverse
- conversion
-
engine
- engineer
- enginery
-
-eer
- pioneer
- auctioneer
-
-ing
- testing
- auditing
What it sits beside
Same subject
- binary analysis
- decompilation
- disassembly
- vulnerability research
- model extraction
Same shape
- forward engineering
- software engineering
- security engineering
software examination methods
- static analysis
- dynamic analysis
- reverse engineering
AI security activities
- model extraction
- adversarial testing
- prompt injection testing
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 11: Threat Landscape: Attack Vectors and Adversarial Techniques
With defences named, learn what they must defend against — the full catalogue of attack techniques targeting AI systems, their inputs, outputs, training pipelines, and supply chains.
