It occurred to me that I’ve incorrectly named the main technique shown in my series of articles about reverse-engineering. To explain why, let’s take this diagram from part 2:

  • First, the source code gets compiled into an assembly file ;
  • Then, the assembly file gets assembled into an object file ;
  • Finally, the object files get linked into an executable file.

Since one decompiles an artifact to get source code and one disassembles an artifact to get assembly code, it would be logical that one delinks an artifact to get object files ; yet I had been calling that operation unlinking until recently.

D’oh!

I’ve corrected all instances of this verb in this blog and renamed my Ghidra extension accordingly. I’m sorry in advance if that made a mess of the RSS feed ; hopefully I didn’t also make a mess of the terminology too since there are scant few resources online about it.