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The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

blog.chrislewis.au

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Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#61

Post by jasonjmcghee »

yieldcrv wrote: post #58
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be "source available", if anything, not "open source". > An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified or shared (with or without modification) under defined terms and conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source Companies have been really abusing what open source means- claiming something is…

Open source never meant free to begin with and was never software specific, that’s a colloquialism and I’d love to say “language evolves” in favor of the software community’s use but open source is used in other still similar contexts, specifically legal and public policy ones FOSS specifically means/meant free and open source software, the free and software words are there for a reason so we don’t need another disti…

Whether or not something is "free" is a separate matter and subject to how the software is licensed. If there is no license it is, by definition "source available", not open source. "source available" is not some new distinction I'm making up.

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175760

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#63

Post by heavyset_go »

Am I just wrong in thinking doing decompilation of copyrighted code via the cloud is a bad idea?

Like, if it ever leaks, or you were planning on releasing it, literally every step you took in your crime is uploaded to the cloud ready to send you to prison.

It's what's stopped me from using hosted LLMs for DMCA-legal RE. All it takes is for a prosecutor/attorney to spin a narrative based on uploaded evidence and your ass is in court.

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#64

Post by viraptor »

knackers wrote: post #2

I've been experimenting with running Claude in headless mode + a continuous loop to decompile N64 functions and the results have been pretty incredible. (This is despite already using Claude in my decompilation workflow). I hope that others find this similarly useful.

One thing I don't annoying in really old sources is that sometimes you can't go function by function, because the code will occasionally just use a random register to pass results. Passing the whole file works better at that point.

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#65

Post by Juliate »

heavyset_go wrote: post #63

Am I just wrong in thinking doing decompilation of copyrighted code via the cloud is a bad idea? Like, if it ever leaks, or you were planning on releasing it, literally every step you took in your crime is uploaded to the cloud ready to send you to prison. It's what's stopped me from using hosted LLMs for DMCA-legal RE. All it takes is for a prosecutor/attorney to spin a narrative based on uploaded evidence and your…

It wouldn't fit most of the current LLM cloud providers narrative about privacy and copyright either, so, not sure they would be as cooperative with a prosecutor as they are today with lawmakers and right holders.

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#67

Post by mh- »

euroderf wrote: post #20
ronsor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used LLMs to help with decompilation since the original release of GPT-4. They're excellent at recognizing the purpose of functions and refactoring IDA or Ghidra pseudo-C into readable code.

Someone please try this on an original (early 1980s) IBM-PC BIOS.

Got a bin?

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#68

Post by vunderba »

sa1 wrote: post #37
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be "source available", if anything, not "open source". > An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified or shared (with or without modification) under defined terms and conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source Companies have been really abusing what open source means- claiming something is…

But clean room reverse engineered code can have its own license, no?

In fact, the story of how Atari tried to circumvent the lockout chip on the original NES is a good example of this.

They had gotten surprisingly close to a complete decompilation, but then they tried to request a copy of the source code from the copyright office citing that they needed it as a result of ongoing unrelated litigation with Nintendo.

Later on this killed them in court.

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#69

Post by simonw »

wavemode wrote: post #57
t_mann wrote: post #45

> The ‘give up after ten attempts’ threshold aims to prevent Claude from wasting tokens when further progress is unlikely. It was only partially successful, as Claude would still sometimes make dozens of attempts. Not what I would have expected from a 'one-shot'. Maybe self-supervised would be a more suitable term?

"one-shot" usually just means, one example and its correct answer was provided in the prompt. See also, "zero-shot" / "few-shot" etc.

I've seen one-shot used to mean two different things in LLMs:

1. Getting an LLM to do something based on a single example

2. Getting an LLM to achieve a goal from a single prompt with no follow-ups

I think both are equally valid.

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#70

Post by mkatx »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #36
rlili wrote: post #12

Makes me wonder if decompilation could eventually become so trivial that everything would become de-facto open source.

It would be "source available", if anything, not "open source". > An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified or shared (with or without modification) under defined terms and conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source Companies have been really abusing what open source means- claiming something is…

So instead of reverse engineering.. an llm/agent/whatever could simply produce custom apps for everyone, simply implementing the features an individual might want. A more viable path?
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