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

Analysis environments


The environment setup in reverse engineering is crucial to the result. We need a sandbox environment where we can dissect and play with the file, without worrying that we may break something. And since the most popular operating systems are Microsoft Windows and Linux, let's discuss using these operating systems in a virtual environment.

Virtual machines

From the first chapter, we introduced using VirtualBox as our desktop virtualization system. The reason we chose VirtualBox was because of it being freeware. But besides VirtualBox, choosing the right sandboxing software depends on user preferences and requirements. There are pros and cons for every piece of sandboxing software, so it is worth exploring those on offer to find out which software you prefer. Here's a small list of virtualization software:

  • VMWare Workstation: This is a commercial, and widely popular, piece of virtualization software. VMWare Workstation can be downloaded from https://www.vmware.com.
  • VirtualBox...