Research Summary: Cheap AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do

Research indicates that generative AI is destabilizing the legal and operational foundations of reverse engineering by dramatically reducing the cost, time, and technical expertise required for implementation. By automating hardware component identification, firmware extraction, object code decompilation, and application cloning, generative AI undermines the practical friction that legal systems have historically relied upon to distinguish lawful analysis from impermissible copying.

Why it matters

This shift fundamentally alters the competitive and defensive posture of technology development by nullifying technical obscurity as a barrier to replication. Because legal protections historically relied on the natural friction of reverse engineering, institutions can no longer assume that proprietary designs are practically secure from rapid cloning. Consequently, corporate asset protection and regulatory doctrines governing intellectual property must confront an environment of automated software and hardware deconstruction.

Key insights

• Existing intellectual property and technology laws depend on the high cost, time requirements, and specialized expertise of reverse engineering as an informal filter against illicit theft and copying.
• Generative AI lowers the barriers to reverse engineering, making the process significantly faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
• Capabilities of AI systems include identifying hardware components, extracting firmware, decompiling object code, and cloning entire applications.
• The acceleration of AI-enabled reverse engineering directly challenges current legal frameworks encompassing trade secrets, copyright, anti-circumvention, computer misuse, and contract law.

Source

arXiv — Computers and Society — https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35633