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

Disassemblers


Disassemblers are tools used to look at the low-level code of a program compiled from either a high-level language, or of the same low-level language. As part of analysis, deadlisting and recognizing the blocks of code help to build up the behavior of the program. It is then be easier to identify only code blocks that need to be thoroughly debugged, without running through the whole program code:

  • IDA Pro: A popular tool used in the software security industry to disassemble various low-level language built on the x86 and ARM architectures. It has a wide list of features. It can generate a graphical flow of code, showing code blocks and branching. It also has scripting that can be used to parse through the code and disassemble it into more meaningful information. IDA Pro has an extended plugin, called Hex-Rays, that is capable of identifying assembly codes to its equivalent C source or syntax. The free version of IDA Pro can be downloaded from https://www.hex-rays.com/products...