[Tiller Beauchamp] gave a presentation on applied reverse engineering in OS X at this year’s REcon, but he also attended many of the other talks and gives his take on the highlights of REcon 2008 in a guest post on the ZDNet blog, Zero Day.

One of the highlights for him was Neohapsis’s [Chris Smith] discussing virtual machines implementing code obfuscation. The method uses custom instructions and runtime interpreter, which can help make the task of reverse engineering markedly more difficult if implemented properly.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, [Beauchamp] noted [Gerardo Richarte]’s software reverse engineering tools that decompile and recompile software in iterative portions. This allows the recompiled software to be tested piece by piece. Be sure to read his post and see what you missed.