reverse debugging

Chris Domas's DEF CON 23 talk on psychological warfare against reverse engineers. He builds code whose disassembly and control flow graphs mislead, intimidate and demoralize anyone analyzing it.

An overview of the PTVS 2.0 beta feature for debugging Python and C/C++ together in one session in Visual Studio.

Greg Law's 15-minute CppCon 2015 lightning talk shows what GDB can do beyond basic use, including its text user interface and reverse debugging.

Stuart Halloway of Cognitect argues for debugging with the scientific method: form hypotheses, try to falsify them, and write everything down. The talk is given to the Clojure community but applies to any language.

A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.

Paul Irish's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk surveys the state of the art in Chrome DevTools debugging. It covers workspaces, diffs, CSS coverage, Node debugging, editor improvements and Lighthouse.

Ken Shirriff walks through how to reverse engineer integrated circuits from die photos, using famous chips as examples, in a Hackaday SuperConference talk.

Michael Steil's 27c3 talk on reverse engineering the MOS 6502 from die shots into a transistor-level simulation, as in the Visual6502 project. It covers going from chip package to a digital model.

Ron Garret tells the story of the Remote Agent Experiment on NASA's Deep Space 1, where autonomous software controlled a spacecraft in 1999. He describes debugging Lisp code remotely from millions of miles away.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) shows 'reverse emulation', using a Raspberry Pi in an NES cartridge to give an unmodified NES new abilities such as playing SNES games. The video starts in a strange way and gets stranger.

Bryan Cantrill's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on debugging production systems under pressure, centered on the incident where an operator's mistyped command rebooted an entire Joyent datacenter. It covers human factors, automation and architecture.

Allan Blomquist demonstrates the internal programming and debugging tools Tomorrow Corporation uses to make games, including live modification of a running game and time-travel debugging.

Linkus7 explains how a community reverse-engineered The Wind Waker to predict its random number generator and beat the Sploosh Kaboom battleship minigame consistently. It includes d3 animations by Peter Schmidt-Nielsen.

Aamer Rahman of Fear of a Brown Planet delivers a stand-up routine on so-called reverse racism, arguing about power imbalance and why criticism of a dominant group is not equivalent to racism.

Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.

Alex Ionescu's OffensiveCon 2019 keynote on how reverse engineering is done on Windows without conventional reversing. It covers legal ways to obtain names of variables, exported functions and structures.

A five-minute demo of the Common Lisp debugger fixing a bug, recompiling a single function, and resuming execution from the failed stack frame. It shows how to avoid re-running long computations.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

LabCoatz uses mass spectrometry, with help from other science YouTubers, to reverse engineer the Coca-Cola flavor and builds a chemically-identical replica. The video walks through a year of work on the formula.

Christopher Domas's REcon 2013 talk on dynamic binary visualization for reverse engineering. He shows how rendering binary data as interactive visual maps and trigraphs reveals structure that hex dumps hide, leading to his Cantor.dust tool.

Bruce Waggoner of the Voyager team describes how engineers diagnosed Voyager 1's 2023 loss of telemetry and patched its flight software from 15 billion miles away. The talk covers the spacecraft's architecture and the scarcity of old documentation.

JPL's David Cummings presents at the 2025 Flight Software Workshop how the team diagnosed and fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 anomaly from billions of miles away. It walks through the flight computer and the memory fix.

Allan Savory's TED talk arguing that desertification of grasslands can be reversed with holistic managed grazing, which he says would also help reverse climate change. TED notes that other scientists have challenged his claims.

Bryan Cantrill's 2007 Google Tech Talk on DTrace, showing how dynamic tracing improves debugging of both development and live production systems. It includes a vivid war story about tracking down a problem on a Sun Ray server.

A 36C3 talk on the AMD Platform Security Processor, an undocumented ARM core inside AMD CPUs that runs before the main processor. The speakers present their reverse engineering of its internals.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2018 keynote on preventing, finding and fixing bugs under a time budget. He covers testing practice, type annotation tradeoffs and the limits of coverage metrics.

Veritasium presents David Sinclair's information theory of aging, which says aging is a loss of epigenetic information, and the evidence that aging can be slowed or reversed. It touches on stressors like fasting, exercise and cold exposure.

A 37C3 talk on how a series of Polish electric trains stopped working after servicing by an independent company. The speakers explain how train control systems work and how they reverse-engineered the software lockouts.

Real air traffic control audio of the Air Astana flight whose flight controls had been wired in reverse by a maintenance error. The pilots struggle to keep control while ATC tries to help.

Dan Abramov live-codes hot reloading with time-travel debugging at React Europe 2015, debuting Redux and its devtools. The slides themselves are driven by application state.

Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.

Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.

A look inside Dr Abrasive's lab as he engineers a flash-card replacement for the Sega Saturn optical drive after cracking its CD protection 20 years on.

A 33c3 talk by marcan on reverse engineering the PS4 hardware to run Linux with 3D acceleration. It covers how the console differs from a PC and includes a story about tunneling PCIe over RS-232.

A Plogue developer shows the custom electronic test rigs built to measure the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis sound chip (YM2612) for the chipsynth MD emulation. It covers the years of testing and reverse engineering needed to reproduce the chip's quirks accurately.

An episode of Plogue's chipresearch series on emulating the Yamaha DX7 from the hardware up. It covers the sub CPU and main CPU, address map investigation, cartridges, firmware analysis and a skeleton MAME driver.

Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman present the newest Chrome Dev Tools features at Google I/O 2011, including live CSS editing, saving changes, breakpoints and network analysis. It also covers remote debugging.

In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Bryan Cantrill demonstrates DTrace and explains how it improves debugging of both development and live production systems.

An Asianometry explainer on why the Soviet Union, once a leading computing power, fell far behind the US in computers by the 1980s. It traces the gap from the 1960s onward despite strong state support for science.