9.7 Exercises.
9.6.1 Summary
The method is probably too old-school for modern computers. Supposedly, this file format was developed
in the mid-80’s by someone who also coded forbig ironwith memory/disk space economy in mind. Nev-
ertheless, it has been an interesting and yet easy task to understand a proprietary file format without
looking into Oracle RDBMS’s code.
9.7 Exercises
Try to reverse engineer of any binary files of your favorite game, including high-score files, resources, etc.
There are also binary files with known structure: utmp/wtmp files, try to understand its structure without
documentation.
The EXIF header in JPEG file is documented, but you can try to understand its structure without help, just
shoot photos at various date/time, places, and try to find date/time and GPS location in EXIF. Try to patch
GPS location, upload JPEG file to Facebook and see, how it will put your picture on the map.
Try to patch any information in MP3 file and see how your favorite MP3-player will react.
9.8 Further reading.
Pierre Capillon – Black-box cryptanalysis of home-made encryption algorithms: a practical case study.