Book Image

Mastering Reverse Engineering

By : Reginald Wong
Book Image

Mastering Reverse Engineering

By: Reginald Wong

Overview of this book

If you want to analyze software in order to exploit its weaknesses and strengthen its defenses, then you should explore reverse engineering. Reverse Engineering is a hackerfriendly tool used to expose security flaws and questionable privacy practices.In this book, you will learn how to analyse software even without having access to its source code or design documents. You will start off by learning the low-level language used to communicate with the computer and then move on to covering reverse engineering techniques. Next, you will explore analysis techniques using real-world tools such as IDA Pro and x86dbg. As you progress through the chapters, you will walk through use cases encountered in reverse engineering, such as encryption and compression, used to obfuscate code, and how to to identify and overcome anti-debugging and anti-analysis tricks. Lastly, you will learn how to analyse other types of files that contain code. By the end of this book, you will have the confidence to perform reverse engineering.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 12. Practical Reverse Engineering of a Windows Executable

Reverse engineering is very common when dealing with malware analysis. In this chapter, we will look at an executable program and determine its actual behavioral flow using the tools we have learned so far. We will head straight from static analysis to dynamic analysis. This will require that we have our lab set up ready so that it will be easier to follow through. 

The target file that will be analyzed in this chapter has behaviors that were seen in actual malware. Regardless of a file being malware or not, we have to handle every file we analyze carefully in an enclosed environment. Let's get started on performing some reversing.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Practical static analysis
  • Practical dynamic analysis