Data reverse engineering: A historical survey

Data reverse engineering is a rapidly growing field which is sometimes misunderstood. In our effort to promote the realization that data reverse engineering is a valuable and essential part of reverse engineering and is now finding ifs place in software engineering, we present a summary of the history of data reverse engineering. In this paper, a definition of data reverse engineering, a summary of the history of what has been done and published, a statement about the state-of-the-art today, and a comment on the future of DRE is presented.