Decompiling installers
Hi All,
BIG problem. I have lost the source code to an installer I wrote last year. The publisher wants changes and a new release!
Does anyone know if you can reverse engineer a setup.exe?
Stu
Archive: Decompiling installers
Decompiling installers
Hi All,
BIG problem. I have lost the source code to an installer I wrote last year. The publisher wants changes and a new release!
Does anyone know if you can reverse engineer a setup.exe?
Stu
Sorry, that is not possible.
may I ask why not? I mean, the compiler follows a set of instructions to create the installer, why isn't it possible to follow those instructions in reverse?
In theory it is possible to get parts of the script back.
However, there are quite some things you won't get back:
* The whole script structure with macros, defined symbols etc.
* Instructions that are processed to other instructions on compile-time
* Instructions that are translated to resources
* Index names
etc.
That makes it already quite useless.
Then, the next problem is that every NSIS release or recompiled version can have different opcodes for the instructions. There is no easy way to find out which opcode should be translated back to a certain instruction.
And nobody has written an application that will try to decompile parts of installers, because that will probably take lots of time and it won't be used by many.
So writing the script again is the only solution.