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I have installed an unofficial patch to an application I am using, which essentially uses unix's patch command to apply a binary diff file to a directory. It appears to me it modifies the object files and not the source files. I have noticed a "feature" in the patch which I would like to fix. Is it possible to decompile the binary path file in order to correct the problem?

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No

The diff only contains the bits and pieces that have changed. You need the source that was used to generate the diff if you want to do more altreations.

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well .. mhh .. no. you can reverse engineer binary only code and change binary only code. it is for sure harder than having the source code, but you can do that. you have to reverse engineer the original binary and the new one and see, where in the code the changes were or where the new feature should be. – akira Dec 4 '10 at 14:07
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@akira - Agreed in principle but for any practical situation the answer is still no – Nifle Dec 4 '10 at 15:33
well, in practice i did it so ... :) – akira Dec 4 '10 at 15:41
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If you have to ask, probably not...You could have unpatched and patched versions and feed it to IDA with the bindiff or turbodiff plugins and do some work on assembly ;)

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note: if you want to get into some of this end of things check out pentest.cryptocity.net section on reversing – Call me V Dec 4 '10 at 12:07

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