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

Dumping processes from memory


A packed file's data cannot be seen in plain sight, but if we let it run, everything is expected to be unpacked in its process space. What we aim to do is to  produce a version of the file in its unpacked state. To do that, we need to dump the whole memory then extract the executable's process image to a file.

Memory dumping with VirtualBox

We will be using Volatility to dump the process from a suspended VirtualBox image. First of all, we need to learn how to dump a VirtualBox image:  

  1. Enable the VirtualBox's debug menu:
    • For Windows VirtualBox hosts:
      • Enter a new environment variable named VBOX_GUI_DBG_ENABLED and set it to true. This is shown in the following screenshot:
    • For Linux hosts:
      • Edit/etc/environment as a root user
      • Add a new entry VBOX_GUI_DBG_ENABLED=true 
      • Execute the command: source /etc/environment
      • Restart VirtualBox if already opened
  1. Run the packed executable in the Windows guest. We are going to run upxed.exe from our GitHub page.
  2. From the VBoxDbg console...