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

Anti-VM tricks


This trick's aim is to exit the program when it identifies that it is running in a virtualized environment. The most typical way to identify being in a VM is to check for specific virtualization software artifacts installed in the machine. These artifacts may be located in the registry or a running service. We have listed a few specific artifacts that can be used to identify being run inside a VM. 

VM running process names

The easiest way for a program to determine whether it is in a VM is by identifying known file names of running processes. Here's a list for each of the most popular pieces of VM software:

Virtualbox

VMWare

QEMU

Parallels

VirtualPC

vboxtray.exevboxservice.exevboxcontrol.exe

vmtoolsd.exevmwaretray.exevmwareuserVGAuthService.exevmacthlp.exe

qemu-ga.exe

prl_cc.exeprl_tools.exe

vmsrvc.exevmusrvc.exe

Existence of VM files and directories

Identifying the existence of at least one of the VM software's files can tell if the program is running in a virtual machine. The following...