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 understood what obfuscation is all about. As a means of hiding data, simple cryptography is one of the most commonly used techniques. Identifying simple decryption algorithms requires looking for the cipher key, the data to decrypt, and the size of the data. After identifying these decryption parameters, all we need to do is place a breakpoint at the exit point of the decryption code. We can also monitor the decrypted code using the memory dump of the debugging tool.

We cited a few methods used in obfuscation, such as control flow flattening, garbage code insertion, metamorphic code, dynamically importing API functions, and directly accessing the process information block. Identifying obfuscated codes and data helps us overcome the analysis of complicated code. Obfuscation was introduced as a way to conceal information.

In the next chapter, we'll continue introducing the same concept, but in particular, we'll look how they are implemented in an executable file...