Disassembler

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A disassembler is a computer program which translates machine language into assembly language, performing the inverse operation to that of an assembler. A dissasembler differs from a decompiler, which targets a high level language rather than assembly language. Disassembly, the output of a disassembler, is often formatted for human-readability rather than suitability for input to an assembler, making it principly a reverse-engineering tool.

Assembly language source code generally permits the use of symbolic constants and programmer comments. These are usually removed from the final machine code by the assembler. If so, a disassembler operating on the machine code would produce disassembly lacking these constants and comments; the dissassembled output becomes more difficult for a human to interpret than the original annotated source code. Some disassemblers can infer useful names and comments; however, interactive disassemblers are able to successfully disassemble more programs than fully-automated disassemblers because human insight applied to the disassembly process parallels human creativity in the code writing process.

There can never be a completely automated disassembly tool which always outputs correct source code because the disassembly process reduces to the impossible-to-solve halting problem.

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Disassemblers

Most debuggers include a disassembler, e.g. objdump, part of GNU Binutils, or e2dbg, the Embedded ELF debugger part of the ELF shell framework.
BORG Disassembler with source code
RosASM - 32 bit Assembler (The Bottom Up Assembler which is free and GPLed). Although this tool is basically an assembler, it also contains a very powerful (though automated) disassembler that is able to rebuild a huge variety of small applications. Support for disassembly of larger applications is under development.
Interactive Disassembler - A commercial, interactive disassembler.
EclipseIDA-Interactive DisassemblerToDecompiler Eclipse module with Interactive Disassembler
NetbeansIDA-Interactive DisassemblerToDecompiler Netbeans module with Interactive Disassembler
Sourcer - A disassembler based on definition files.
The Bastard Disassembler - Linux disassembler. Doesn't have a usable front-end yet, but it does have an interactive command-line mode.
- x86 Disassembler Library - The library that Bastard is based on.
The Libasm from the ELF shell (elfsh) comes with advanced symbol resolving features
Kopi Project
PVDasm - Proview (a.k.a: PVDasm) is a free Interactive, Multi-Cpu (x86/Chip8) Disassembler. with features such as: PE-Editor, Process Manager and Dumper, Plugin SDK, MASM Source Code Generator, MAP File analysis, Hex Editor, Function Param Recognition and more.
- PVDasm screen shot.
[[[Template:Javadoc:SE/Home URL]]docs/tooldocs/solaris/javap.html The Java Class File Disassembler]
HT Editor - Binary editor for Linux and Windows console.
PE Explorer Disassembler - a win32 PE file disassembler designed to reconstruct the assembly language source code of target binary win32 PE (Portable Executable) files such as .EXE, .DLL, Device Drivers (.SYS), OCX Controls, and Borland Libraries (.dpl & .bpl).
Udis86 Udis86 is an easy-to-use minimalistic disassembler library for the x86 and x86-64 (AMD64) range of instruction set architectures, designed to aid software development projects that entail binary code analysis.
diStorm64 diStorm is an open source highly optimized stream disassembler library for 80x86 and AMD64.

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References

L. Vinciguerra, L. Wills, N. Kejriwal, P. Martino, and R. Vinciguerra, "An Experimentation Framework for Evaluating Disassembly and Decompilation Tools for C++ and Java", Proc. of 10th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE) 2003.
B. Schwarz, S. Debray, and G. Andrews, "Disassembly of Executable Code Revisited", Proc. of 9th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), pp. 45-54, 2002.

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