[TUHS] UNIX Disassemblers and other RE Tools

[Clem Cole]

below...

On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 3:51 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Hello, I've been doing some research on the history of disassembly lately,
> tools available historically, today, and what sorts of developments have
> been made regarding utilities and systems for taking a machine-code binary
> and working it back to some semblance of source code.
>
> So in the early days UNIX had das(I), a PDP-11 disassembler I believe
> written by Ken (he's OWNER in the manual) with very little information
> other than "it exists".  Fast forward to the UNIX 4.1 manual in 1981 for
> the 3B20S and there is dis(1), a 3B20 disassembler.  Other such manuals
> feature dis(1) versions for other 3B targets.
>
> Was a disassembler ever considered part of the standard binary objects
> toolkit with the assembler, linker, etc.

not to my memory - although some of the debuggers could.  IIRC, the DDT
that was on the Harvard tape knew about it.  I also remember on that tape
was a PDP-11 disassembler.   Phil Karn wrote a table-based one for UNIX
when we were students - but it was aimed at 8-bit micros.  It could do
8080/8085 and Z80; if I remember, it could also do MOS6502 and M6800.  It
had a feature that it could take an external symbol table and turn out code
that was reasonable to reassemble.   [ I may have a copy if it squirreled
away ].

That said, while they we not part of the core tool kit, by the time of
BSD4.2 there were a couple of disassemblers kicking around the USENET.   I
remember one for the Vax and another for the 68000. You might do a grep for
dis-assembler in the USENET archives for comp.sources




> or was that the sort of thing that was more niche and therefore just kinda
> cropped up when/if someone decided to write one?

exactly - need driven.  Phil wrote his when we were trying to pull apart a
ROM for a tape controller.  It had a funky interface on it that was not
well documented and what we did have, was wrong.  So, disassembled enough
of the ROM that we could changed it.



> Were there legal concerns to be grappled with when producing a
> disassembler?

Mumble ... by the mid-80s/late-90 people we disassembling code for game
controllers and PCs. So many manufacturers started adding words in the EULA
saying that was a no-no.   But I don't remember worrying about it much when
I was a student  10-15 years before that.




>   Were such tools ever shipped or did they only appear in the manuals as
> they were technically up in the code base, just not commonly distributed or
> used?  Also, was there any thought given during the development of C to
> producing "decompilers" as has been becoming more common lately?  Or was it
> a foregone conclusion that C to assembly is a "lossy" conversion and going
> the other direction couldn't be fully automated.
>
Again - in V6/V7 with DMR's compiler, it was not always easy, but the code
generally was pretty straightforward.

Post Wulf's 'Green Book' on compiler optimization and we started to have a
generation of BLISS-style optimizers pretty much everywhere, I think those
compilers really started refactoring code plus instruction sets got more
sophisticated, so I think it started to get harder and harder to
reconstruct.

But I'll defer to someone like Paul W or Steve Johnson who loved building
those style of tools.

>
> Thank you for any insights!
>
> - Matt G.
>
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