SECAI Core · phase 11 of 15
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.
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.
