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 5. Tools of the Trade

In the previous chapters, we used some simple reversing tools, such as PEiD, CFF Explorer, IDA Pro, and OllyDbg, which aided us in our reversing adventure. This chapter explores and introduces more tools we can use and choose from. The selection of tools depend on the analysis required. For example, if a file was identified as an ELF file type, we'd need to use tools for analyzing a Linux executable. 

This chapter covers tools for Windows and Linux, categorized for static and dynamic analysis. There are a lot of tools available out there—don't limit yourself to the tools discussed in this book.

In this chapter, you will achieve the following learning outcomes:

  • Setting up tools
  • Understanding static and dynamic tools for Windows, and Linux
  • Understanding support tools