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.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Intel Architecture

ELF executables

Patching ELF executables is a bit more difficult than patching their PE counterparts as ELF files tend to have no spare space in their sections, thus leaving no other choice but to either add a section, which is not as simple as with PE files, or inject a shared object.

Adding a section requires a good knowledge of the ELF format (specifications can be found at http://www.skyfree.org/linux/references/ELF_Format.pdf), which, although quite interesting, resides, in its fullness, outside the scope of this book. The most noticeable problem is in the way sections and headers are arranged within an ELF executable and in the way an ELF structure is treated by Linux, which makes it hard to append data as we did in the case of PE patching.

Injection of a shared object, on the other hand, is much simpler to implement and easy to use, so let's proceed this way.

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