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

Chapter 3. The Low-Level Language

The main piece of knowledge required in advance for any reverse engineer is assembly language. Understanding assembly language is like learning the ABCs of reversing. It may look hard at first, but eventually it will become like a muscle memory. Assembly language is the language that is used to communicate with the machine. The source code of a program can be understood by humans but not by the machine. The source code has to be compiled down to its assembly language code form for the machine to understand it. 

But, as humans, what if the source code is not available? Our only way to understand what a program does is to read its assembly codes. In a way, what we are building here is a way to turn an assembly language code back to the source code. That would be why this is called reversing.

We will provide a brief introduction to assembly language, focusing on the x86 Intel architecture. So, why x86? There are a lot of architectures out there, such as 8080...