Legal Considerations

If your analysis and testing are directed solely at code that you yourself created, you are almost certainly within your rights to do all of the types of work discussed in this chapter. However, if the code you wish to study contains components developed or distributed by others, you should be aware that there may be laws or license agreements that could be violated by doing some of these things. For example, the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the circumvention of technological measures to protect copyrighted material except under limited circumstances, and many End User License Agreements contain provisions that purport to restrict or prohibit decompilation, disassembly, or other reverse engineering of licensed software. Therefore, you should to talk with an attorney and obtain permission before doing work in this area.