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

Information gathering tools


Knowing what we are dealing with prepares us further. For example, if a file were identified as a Windows executable, we then prepare Windows executable tools. Information gathering tools helps us identify what the file type is and its properties. The information gathered becomes a part of the analysis profile. These tools are categorized as file type identifying, hash calculating, text string gathering, and monitoring tools.

File type information

These tools gather primary information about a file. The data gathered includes the filename, file size, file type, and file type-specific properties. The result of these tools enables the analyst to plan how to analyze the file:

  • PEiD: A tool used toidentifythe file type, the packer, and compiler. It is built to run in Windows. It is not maintained, but still very useful.
  • TrID: A command-line tool similar to PEiD. This tool has Windows and Linux versions. It can read a community-driven signature database of various file...