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

A bit of kernel space

Until this very moment, we were only working with user-space code, writing small applications. In this part of the chapter, however, we will implement a small and very simple loadable kernel module (LKM) for Linux.

A few years ago, I was engaged in an interesting project, where the objective was to spot the data processed by certain kernel module. The project was even more challenging due to the fact that, not only did I not have access to the kernel sources, I had no access to the kernel itself, not to mention that it was not an Intel platform. All I knew was the version of the kernel in question and the name and address of the target module.

I had to go a long and interesting way until I was able to build an LKM that was capable of doing the work I needed it to do. At the end, I was able to build an LKM written in C, but I would not have been myself if...