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)

The operating system environment

Doing reverse engineering requires the analyst to understand where the software being reversed is being run. The major parts that software requires in order to work in an operating system are the memory and the filesystem. In Windows operating systems, besides the memory and the filesystem, Microsoft introduced the registry system, which is actually stored in protected files called registry hives.

The filesystem

The filesystem is where data is stored directly to the physical disk drive. These filesystems manage how files and directories are stored in the disk. Various disk filesystems have their own variation of efficiently reading and writing data. 

There are different disk filesystems...