Book Image

Mastering Reverse Engineering

By : Wong
Book Image

Mastering Reverse Engineering

By: 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 (15 chapters)

Anti-dumping tricks


This method does not stop dumping memory to a file. This trick instead prevents the reverser from easily understanding the dumped data. Here are some examples of how this could be applied:

  • Portions of the PE header have been modified, so that the process dump gives the wrong properties.

  • Portions of PEB, such as SizeOfImage, have been modified, so that the process dumping tool dumps wrong.

  • Dumping is very useful for seeing decrypted data. Anti-dumping tricks would re-encrypt the decrypted code or data after use.

To overcome this trick, we can either identify or skip the code that modifies data. For re-encryption, we can also skip the code that re-encrypts, to leave it in a decrypted state.