Nishant Tiwari used AI to reverse engineer Uber's pricing, finding a correlation with phone battery levels. This workflow, powered by an open-source GitHub tool, shows how AI is making once-complex software analysis widely accessible. For proprietary software firms, this raises direct questions about protecting their core product logic.
How We Got Here
Reverse engineering proprietary software traditionally required deep technical expertise, often taking months to interpret assembly code. But the open-source tool Reverse Engineering Anything (REA) recently spiked from 10,000 to 447,000 GitHub stars since October, showing surging interest in AI-driven methods.
The Numbers
- Nishant Tiwari's AI-assisted analysis of Uber's web app found scripts accessing device battery levels and other hardware attributes.
- His repeated tests across four phones showed a correlation between lower battery status and higher ride fares.
- The workflow used Reverse Engineering Anything (REA), an open-source GitHub project with 447,000 stars, up from 10,000 in October.
- Security researcher Himanshu Anand says AI has cut typical reverse engineering task time from a month to "one or two hours."
What Happens Next
🇮🇳 Why This Matters for India
For Bangalore and Hyderabad product teams building B2B SaaS, this means re-evaluating which logic lives client-side versus on secure remote servers to protect their core IP.
The Take
The true casualty here won't be proprietary software itself, but lazy security architectures that expose too much client-side logic. Expect better obfuscation tools and more backend-heavy processing as a direct response from savvy Indian product shops.
Source:
Analytics India Mag ↗