Re: Decompiling an APK file
Of course, that are those cases when you're going against law. But as I understand it, illegal is just cracking software, because you grabbed a paid service without paying, what can be considered as stealing it. Does law contain direct prohibition of reverseengineering? I don't know, but it makes no sense to me to have such a rule, because re is just transforming the file to different form. I mean, if you buy a hoe, noone really cares if you use it to hoe a field or if you break it in two parts and use its metal part to dig some artistic picture later sold for thousands of dollars.
Even if it contained some special features like an undestroyable grip, which is patented by its manufacturer and hold as a secret, you are allowed to check it under electron microscope or check it by fractal derivation or whatever you are able to think out to reveal its secret. As soon as you don't use your knowledge to your own business, you should be fine. If you actually do, you are going against law because of stealing manufacturer's secret, and not because of revealing it.
That's how i see it. But I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not definitely sure.
With antiviruses, yes, they don't use reverseenginering, because they don't need to do so. Source code in C#, Java, or C++ is just a way for humans to better understand code, the same goes for assembler. Bytecode and machine instructions are just their more or less direct representation, hardly readable for us, but good for a program.
but take for example antivirus labs, if they catch a malicious file, they must at least disassemble it to see, how it works, doesn't they?
Best regards
Rastislav
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