Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
There are nearly 2,000 pages at this website. Put aside the placeholders for work that has never properly got under way, and very nearly all the other pages at this website are original research, all offered for free as a public good. To be clear, research does not mean reading from all round the Internet and collating my findings for presentation as my own work. That said, everything here is by its nature an inspection of other people’s work. The research is the development of techniques for the reverse engineering of computer software. The application of those techniques produces original interpretations of what the software does. A measure of originality is that much of what’s here contradicts the manufacturer’s documentation of the software and would be news to the programmers who wrote the software.
I have funded all this work from the proceeds of consultation services years ago when I did very much less research and kept the results to myself. I have been mostly happy to spend my time and money on this full-time research and writing just to see what can be achieved. The form has been a five-year experiment to see what can be done in varying mixtures of research and consulting, including two quite long stretches when I gave myself the luxury of full-time research and writing. How it looks to have turned out, at least for me in the various ways I have tried to make it work, is that research is just about sustainable (with much lowered ambition) when subsidised by consulting fees, but writing up the results is not. I can’t do everything. Maybe someone else could.
I might have attempted all this anyway as a self-indulgence in curiosity, but the compulsion is that someone ought to show that even though Windows is closed-source software, Windows programmers could have reliable details of Windows behaviour independently of Microsoft if reverse-engineering technology were well enough developed and widely enough practised—and since I have the ability and the interest, I have a duty to be the someone.
I’ve put my money where my mouth is. I like to think, and doubt that I am deluded, that these last five years have produced the Internet’s most substantial repository of detailed, reliable information on undocumented Windows functions and features. There are, of course, large tracts of Windows that I know nothing about—but for what I have covered, there can be little anywhere that is done better. Almost every page exists here to say something that had not yet been published elsewhere. Very many pages exist because something that Microsoft says about its own product is incorrect, often in a way that could puzzle anyone who depends on it but which is easily demonstrated as incorrect once it has been properly studied. All this work is the result of reverse engineering, on a scale that I suspect nobody has attempted before or will again.
Though I have done more than anyone can expect just by showing how much can be done with reverse engineering as a technology, it’s not enough. I am forever being asked to make a business case. Of course, that’s as far outside my competence as is reverse engineering for a businessman. It’s no surprise that hardly anyone actually pays for results to be produced from any systematic approach to the reverse engineering of computer software. After all, nobody who might pay has much to go on for what’s achievable, let alone for how it might scale. Yet nobody seems very much interested in paying to find out how much better reverse engineering might be done. That’s a matter of some disappointment to me—and anxiety, since if we can’t work out how to study what’s in our computer software, we have no chance of knowing what’s going on with this century’s new technologies.
It looks increasingly as if what’s here now at this site is all there ever will be. I can’t keep doing it without substantial help. If I had any business skills or were any good at raising funding, I would likely be no good at the research or the writing, let alone at both, and I doubt I’d have even imagined that such research and writing are even possible. Without full-time funding, they pretty much are impossible: the writing up has to stop, and probably the research too.
If you value this website as a public good, then please recommend it to people who have the resources to fund it and may have the will. If all you have is an idea for possible funding, it’s very possibly more than occurs to me with my limited mind for these things, so please send me your suggestion.
Although I am convinced now that research of a high standard demands full-time attention—indeed, commitment—the fact is that the second-best way to get the research funded is to divert some time to commercial consultation, i.e., using skills and knowledge from the research to solve real-world problems for a fee. If you can’t help me find full-time funding, then by far the best support is to recommend my consultation services as widely and strongly as you can.