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

Editing tools


There may be instances where we need to modify the contents of a program to make it work properly, or validate a code behavior. Modifying data in a file can also change the code flow where conditional instructions may happen. Changing instructions can also work around anti-debugging tricks:

  • HxD Hex Editor: A Windowsbinaryfileviewerand editor. You can use this to view the binary contents of a file.
  • Bless: A Linux binary file viewer and editor.
  • Notepad++: A Windows text editor, but can also read binary files, though reading binary files with hexadecimal digits would require a hex-editing plugin. Still, this is useful for reading and analyzing scripts, due to its wide range of supported languages, including Visual Basic and JavaScript.
  • BEYE: A useful tool for viewing and editing any file type. BEYE is available for Windows and Linux. 
  • HIEW: The feature that makes this software worthwhile is its ability to do on-the-fly encryption using assembly language.