Humans vs. Machines: A Comparison With AI Agents in Software Reverse Engineering
Can an autonomous AI agent reverse engineer a binary as well as a skilled human analyst? Do they adopt the same strategy, and can agents scale to real-world programs? We compare human and LLM-based software reverse engineering (SRE): nine models tackle two compact static-analysis challenges previously solved by human analysts, scored with a common understanding rubric, and we record their complete interactions with IDA Pro. This lets us compare not only what humans and agents recover, but also how they investigate a binary. The best agents (GPT-5.5 Pro, Claude Opus 4.8, and Kimi K3) achieve statistically human-competitive understanding on both tasks, while weaker models remain far behind....
| Authors | Samuele Doria, Stefano De Rosa, Ruoyu Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 10 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 October 2026 |
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