Qwen 3.8 27B reverse-engineers a commercial app's license check in 30 minutes

I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job and it finished in 30 minutes

Adam Conway, XDA's Lead Technical Editor, put the open-weights Qwen 3.8 27B to the test on a Lenovo ThinkStation PGX, challenging it to reverse-engineer a commercial app's license check—a task he assumed would need a frontier model. Despite initially refusing and spotting his jailbreak attempt, the model completed the job in 30 minutes using static analysis alone, recovering a deliberately obscured RSA key and even self-correcting its first wrong guess. Conway highlights the implications for threat models: a 27B model running locally on consumer hardware can now perform sophisticated reverse engineering, with privacy cutting both ways.