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

SWF file analysis


ShockWave Flash files can also contain code. Basically, flash files are legitimately written to follow a sequence of tasks. But just like any other code, it can be abused to carry out malicious activities.

The SWF file we are going to analyze can be downloaded from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Reverse-Engineering/blob/master/ch13/demo01.swf.  

The main tool used for analyzing SWF at the time of writing this book is the JPEXS SWF decompiler.  Besides this let's first talk about other existing tools that are able to parse SWF files.  These tools are as follows:

  • SWFTools
  • FLASM
  • Flare
  • XXXSWF

SWFTools

SWFTools is a collection of tools for reading and building SWF files.  It can be downloaded from http://www.swftools.org/. To successfully install SWFTools, it should be run as administrator. The tools are used at the command line. There are two tools here that can extract information about the SWF file: swfdump and swfextract. Here's what swfdump gives us:

The result tells...