Merry Xmas, fellow code nerds: Avast open-sources decompiler
Malware hunting biz and nautical jargon Avast has released its machine-code decompiler RetDec as open source, in the hope of arming like-minded haters of bad bytes and other technically inclined sorts with better analytical tools.
As discussed as the recent Botconf 2017 in France earlier this month, RetDec provides a way to turn machine code – binary executables – back into an approximation of the original source code.
Where disassemblers convert binaries into assembly code – a somewhat readable representation of machine code – decompilers attempt to go back further to a higher-level source code language not tied to a specific processor – something more readable like C code.