Dynamic reverse-engineering on a budget Technical Report COMP-002-2008 Computing Department Lancaster University

In this article we present COSMOPEN, a reverse engineering tool optimised for the behavioural analysis of complex layered software. COSMOPEN combines cheap and non-intrusive observation techniques with a versatile graph manipulation engine. By programming different graph manipulation scripts, the “focal length” of our tool can be adapted to the different abstraction levels found in complex software. We illustrate how our tool can be used to extract high-level behavioural models from a complex multithreaded platform (GNU/Linux, CORBA middleware).