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 8. Sandboxing - Virtualization as a Component for RE

In previous chapters, we have used virtualization software, in particular, VirtualBox or VMware, to set up our Linux and Windows environments to conduct analysis. virtualization worked fine since these virtualization software only support x86 architecture. Virtualization is a very useful component of reverse engineering. In fact, most software is built under x86 architecture.  Virtualization uses the resources of the host machine's CPU via the hypervisor. 

Unfortunately, there are other CPU architectures out there that doesn't support virtualization. VirtualBox nor VMware doesn't support these architectures.  What if we were given a non-x86 executable to work with?  And all we have is an operating system installed in an x86 machine. Well, this should not stop us from doing reverse engineering.

To work around this issue, we will be using emulators. Emulators have been around long before the hypervisor was even introduced.  Emulators...