Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

By : Alexey Lyashko
3 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

3 (1)
By: Alexey Lyashko

Overview of this book

The Assembly language is the lowest level human readable programming language on any platform. Knowing the way things are on the Assembly level will help developers design their code in a much more elegant and efficient way. It may be produced by compiling source code from a high-level programming language (such as C/C++) but can also be written from scratch. Assembly code can be converted to machine code using an assembler. The first section of the book starts with setting up the development environment on Windows and Linux, mentioning most common toolchains. The reader is led through the basic structure of CPU and memory, and is presented the most important Assembly instructions through examples for both Windows and Linux, 32 and 64 bits. Then the reader would understand how high level languages are translated into Assembly and then compiled into object code. Finally we will cover patching existing code, either legacy code without sources or a running code in same or remote process.

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Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
Intel Architecture
Intel Architecture
Processor registers
Summary
2
Setting Up a Development Environment
Setting Up a Development Environment
Microsoft Macro Assembler
GNU Assembler (GAS)
Flat Assembler
Summary
3
Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)
Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)
Assembly source template
Data types and their definitions
A debugger
The instruction set summary
Summary
4
Memory Addressing Modes
Memory Addressing Modes
Addressing code
Addressing data
Far pointers
Summary
5
Parallel Data Processing
Parallel Data Processing
SSE
Biorhythm calculator
AVX-512
Summary
6
Macro Instructions
Macro Instructions
What are macro instructions?
An introduction to calling conventions
A note on Flat Assembler's macro capabilities
Macro instructions in MASM and GAS
Other assembler directives (FASM Specific)
Summary
7
Data Structures
Data Structures
Arrays
Structures
Linked lists
Trees
Sparse matrices
Graphs
Summary
8
Mixing Modules Written in Assembly and Those Written in High-Level Languages
Mixing Modules Written in Assembly and Those Written in High-Level Languages
Crypto Core
Interfacing with C/C++
Assembly and managed code
Summary
9
Operating System Interface
Operating System Interface
The rings
System call
Using libraries
Summary
10
Patching Legacy Code
Patching Legacy Code
The executable
The issue
PE files
ELF executables
Summary
11
Oh, Almost Forgot
Oh, Almost Forgot
Protecting the code
A bit of kernel space
Summary

PE files

In order to successfully implement a patch, we need to understand the PE file format (PE stands for portable executable). While a detailed specification may be obtained at this URL, http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/PECOFF.mspx, we only need to understand a few things about the format and be able to manually parse its basic structure.

Headers

A PE file contains several headers and the first one we encounter is the DOS header, which only contains two things that are interesting for us; the first is the MZ signature and the second is the offset of the file header, also known as the PE header (as it is preceded by the PE\x0\x0 signature). The file header contains basic information about the file...

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