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

Summary


In this chapter, we have learned that, even if the file is not a Windows or a Linux x86-native executable, we can still analyze a non-x86 executable file. With static analysis alone, we can analyze a file without even doing dynamic analysis, although we still need references to understand the low-level language of non-x86 architectures, categorized as RISC or CISC. Just as we learned x86 assembly language, languages such as ARM assembly can be learned with the same concepts.

However, an analysis can still be proven with actual code execution, using dynamic analysis. To do that, we need to set up the environment where the executable will run natively. We introduced an emulation tool called QEMU that can do the job for us. It has quite a number of architectures that it can support, including ARM. Today, one of the most popular operating system using ARM architecture is Arch Linux. This operating system is commonly deployed by Raspberry Pi enthusiasts.

We also learned about debugging...