Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

By : Alexey Lyashko
3 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

3 (1)
By: Alexey Lyashko

Overview of this book

The Assembly language is the lowest level human readable programming language on any platform. Knowing the way things are on the Assembly level will help developers design their code in a much more elegant and efficient way. It may be produced by compiling source code from a high-level programming language (such as C/C++) but can also be written from scratch. Assembly code can be converted to machine code using an assembler. The first section of the book starts with setting up the development environment on Windows and Linux, mentioning most common toolchains. The reader is led through the basic structure of CPU and memory, and is presented the most important Assembly instructions through examples for both Windows and Linux, 32 and 64 bits. Then the reader would understand how high level languages are translated into Assembly and then compiled into object code. Finally we will cover patching existing code, either legacy code without sources or a running code in same or remote process.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Intel Architecture

Summary

In this chapter, we have very briefly covered the numerous abilities of the macro instructions in Assembly language programming. Unfortunately, it may require an entire book to mention everything that may be done with macro instructions, especially when it comes to the Flat Assembler, which has an exceptional preprocessor.

An example from my own practice: I once had to implement a heavily obfuscated version of the AES128 decryption algorithm, which took 2175 lines in total, having only a few procedures, and almost half of that (1064 lines) was occupied by the definition of different macro instructions. As you may safely assume, about 30% to 60% of each procedure contained the invocation thereof.

In the next chapter, we will continue to dive deeper into the preprocessor and deal with different data structures, and the creation and management thereof.

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