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

Decompilers


Disassemblers are used to show the low-level code of a compiled high-level program. Decompilers, on the other hand, attempt to show the high-level source code of the program. These tools work by identifying blocks of low-level code that match with corresponding syntax in the high-level program. It is expected that these tools won't be able to show what the original program's source code looks like, but nonetheless, they help speed up analysis with a better view of the program's pseudo code:

  • Snowman: This is a C and C++ decompiler. It can run as astandalonetool, or as an IDA Pro plugin. The source can be found at https://github.com/yegord/snowman, while itscompiledbinaries can bedownloadedfrom https://derevenets.com/. It is available for Windows and Linux.
  • Hex-Rays: This is also a C and C++ decompiler and runs as a plugin for IDA Pro. It is sold commercially as part of IDA Pro. Users should expect this to have a better decompiled output than Snowman.
  • dotPeek: This is a free .NET...