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


Analyzing various file types also uses the same concept as reversing. In this chapter, we learned about the scripting language that the file format is using. We could gather additional information if we were also inclined to understand the file's header and structure. We also learned that as long as executable code can be embedded into a file, there is a way to analyze it. It may not be dynamically analyzed easily, but at least static analysis can be performed.

We tackled how to debug JavaScript that is embedded in HTML scripts. Virtually, we can analyze any website we visit. We also learned about the tools that we can use to extract macro code in Microsoft Office documents. It also happens that we can debug this macro code using the VBA Editor. We also looked at a variety of tools that we can use to extract JavaScript from a PDF file. Then we analyzed an SWF file using JPEXS, a powerful tool that has a disassembler, decompiler, and debugger. 

Reversing engineering software is a concept...