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

Setup


This chapter discusses Linux reverse engineering, so we need to have a Linux setup. For reverse engineering, it is recommended to deploy Linux on a bare-metal machine. And since most of the analysis tools that have been developed are Debian-based, let's use 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop. I chose Ubuntu because it has a strong community. Because of that, most of the issues may already have a resolution or solutions may be readily available. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why build our setup on a bare-metal machine? It is a better host for our sandbox clients, especially when monitoring network traffic. It also has an advantage in proper handling of Windows malware, preventing compromise due to accidental malware execution.

You can go to https://www.ubuntu.com/ to obtain an ISO for the Ubuntu installer. The site includes an installation guide. For additional help, you can visit the community forum at https://ubuntuforums.org/.

Note

"Bare-metal machines" refers to computers that execute code directly on the hardware. It...