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

What is the password?


In this section, we are going to reverse the passcode.exe program. As a practice run, we'll gather the information we need by using static and dynamic analysis tools. We'll use some of the Windows tools that were introduced in the previous chapters. Do not be limited by the tools that we are going to use here. There are a lot of alternatives that can do the same task.  The OS environment used to analyze this program is a Windows 10, 32-bit, 2 GB RAM, 2 core processor in a VirtualBox.

Static analysis

The second piece of information that you'll need to know, next to knowing the filename, is the hash of the file. Let's pick Quickhash (https://quickhash-gui.org/) to help us with this task.  After opening the passcode.exe file using Quickhash, we can get the hash calculations for various algorithms.  The following screenshot shows the calculated SHA256 hash for the passcode.exe file:

The file has a name extension of.exe. This initially sets us to use tools for analyzing Windows...