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

Summary


Reversing a software takes time and patience. It may take days to analyze just one piece of software. But with practice and experience, the time it takes to analyze a file improves.

In this chapter, we dealt with a file that can be reversed using the tools we learned. With the help of a debugger, a disassembler, and tools such as CFF Explorer and TriD, we were able to extract file information and behaviors. In addition, we also learned to use FakeNet to mimic the network and the internet, which became very useful for us when generating network information for the socket functions.

There are a lot of obstacles, including anti-debugging tricks. However, familiarity with these tricks enabled us to skip these codes.

One of the most important tips when reversing is to keep on making snapshots just in case we encounter obstacles. We can experiment on every piece of data that functions require.

Again, reversing is a patience game that you can cheat by saving and loading snapshots.