---
id: 8663
title: "The story of Adobe Reader symbols"
source_domain: projectzero.google
source_url: "https://projectzero.google/2019/10/the-story-of-adobe-reader-symbols.html"
published_at: "2019-10-08T00:00:00Z"
tags: ["reverse-engineering", "symbols", "project-zero", "adobe-reader"]
phying_url: "https://phying.com/item/8663"
lang: en
---

# The story of Adobe Reader symbols

## Summary

Modern day security analysis of client applications is often hindered by the inaccessibility of their source code and other aids such as debug symbols. As a result, it is necessary to perform completely black-box reverse engineering of the software, in order to better understand their internals and reconstruct the missing context information, which is required to identify security flaws, triage and deduplicate crashes and so forth. This part of the process may be quite daunting, and the time spent on manual labor takes away from the time that could be spent testing the security properties of the program. Or in other words, it could be considered a waste of time. :-)

## Intelligence Metadata

- **Sources:** projectzero.google
- **Published:** 2019-10-08T00:00:00Z
- **Original:** https://projectzero.google/2019/10/the-story-of-adobe-reader-symbols.html
- **Phying News:** https://phying.com/item/8663