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

Analysis of HTML scripts


Almost every website we visit contains scripts. Most commonly, it contains JavaScript code that is triggered by clicking on the OK button on a website or by those artistic bubbles and stars that roam around with the mouse pointer. JavaScript is one of the most powerful tools that can be used by a site developer. It can be used to control elements that an internet browser contains. 

Besides JavaScript, Visual Basic scripts (VBScripts) can also be embedded in HTML websites. However, VBScript has been disabled by default in recent web browsers. This is due to the fact that VBScript has been exposed to a lot of vulnerabilities in the past. In addition, JavaScript is the default language used by many internet browsers.

There are two sides for a website to work, that is, the server side and the client side. When visiting a website, we are looking at the client side page. All backend scripts are running at the server side. For example, when visiting a website, the server...