Don't reverse engineer it twice.
17,753 open-source tools that exist because someone reverse engineered a closed app, API, device, protocol, file format, game or AI product.
Search the index or give it to your agent: npx skills add alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered
Agent skill · Categories · Hot this week · Add a project
Before you reverse engineer something
Agents and tools like REA and Ghidra make reverse engineering faster than ever. Still, the app, API, device or file format you are about to open has often been done already, and the work sits in a repo nobody links to.
- Search first. Use the website or the agent skill. Search by product, vendor or protocol.
- Found it? Use it, fix it, and report breakage upstream. One maintained client beats ten private scripts.
- Not there? Do the work, publish it as open source, then add it here so the next person starts where you stopped.
What's inside
17,753 projects with 12.2M GitHub stars between them: 10,142 active, 2,504 slowing down, 3,480 dormant, 1,170 archived. Top languages: Python (4,034), C++ (2,665), C (2,542), JavaScript (1,063), C# (961).
Resurrected
129 products their makers killed, kept alive by open-source projects built through reverse engineering.
See all 129 on the Resurrected page →
Give your AI agent the whole index
When a task needs to talk to something with no official API (a smart plug, a car, a chat app, a file format), your agent searches this index, ranks by stars, activity and license, reads the README, and picks the right tool.
npx skills add alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered
Claude Code plugin
/plugin install reverse-engineered --marketplace alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered
MCP server (Claude Desktop, Cursor, any MCP client)
claude mcp add reverse-engineered -- uvx --from "git+https://github.com/alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered#subdirectory=mcp" reverse-engineered-mcp
{"mcpServers": {"reverse-engineered": {"command": "uvx", "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered#subdirectory=mcp", "reverse-engineered-mcp"]}}}
Any agent or shell (one file, Python standard library only)
curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered/main/plugin/skills/find-reverse-engineered/scripts/re_index.py -o re_index.py
python3 re_index.py search tuya local # ranked matches
python3 re_index.py info make-all/tuya-local # entry + README excerpt
python3 re_index.py clone make-all/tuya-local # shallow clone into vendor/
Filter 17,753 projects by category, language and health, sorted by stars or recent activity. Every search has a shareable link.
Hot this week
The most-starred projects with commits in the last 7 days.
Just added
Most starred
Health
Unofficial APIs break when the vendor changes their side, so check health before you depend on a project.
How it's built
flowchart LR
A[Research agents<br/>GitHub, HN, Reddit,<br/>awesome-lists] --> B[Scope filter<br/>interoperability only]
B --> C[GitHub API check<br/>exists, stars, license]
C --> D[(data/entries.json)]
D --> E[README and<br/>category pages]
D --> F[Search website]
D --> G[Agent skill]
H[Nightly refresh<br/>GitHub Action] -->|stars, archived,<br/>dead links| D
Raw data: data/entries.json. Removed repos: data/removed.json. Imported lists and searches: SOURCES.md.
How we filter
Scope
This index lists interoperability, preservation and research projects: unofficial clients and SDKs, open drivers, local-control libraries, file-format parsers, protocol documentation, reimplementations and decompilations. Reverse engineering for interoperability is protected in many places (for example 17 U.S.C. §1201(f) and Article 6 of the EU Software Directive).
Left out on purpose: exploits and jailbreaks, security or certificate-pinning bypasses, decryption tools, cheats, DRM or paywall removal, CAPTCHA solvers, account bots and credential tools.
Using an unofficial client can break a service's terms of use. Use these projects with your own accounts, devices and data.
Contributing
Know a project that belongs here? Open an issue with the repo link and one line on what it reverse engineers, or send a PR that adds it to data/entries.json. Wrong category, dead link, or out of scope? Open an issue too.
Curated by @alexgaoth with research agents. Every entry is checked against the GitHub API.
Is your project listed?
Add this badge to your README. On the website, each project has a badge button that copies a version linking to its own entry.
[](https://github.com/alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered)
Star history
License
Code (scripts, website, agent skill): MIT. The list and data: CC0 1.0. Each linked project has its own license.
If this saved you from reverse engineering something yourself, give it a star.