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)

Binary numbers

Computers were designed to electronically process and store data using signals. A signal is like an on/off switch, where both the "on" and "off" positions can be denoted by the numbers "1" and "0" respectively. These two numbers are what we call binary numbers. The next section will discuss how binary numbers are used and how this relates to other number bases.

Bases

The place value of a digit in a number determines its value at that position. In the standard decimal numbers, the value of a place is ten times the value of the place on its right. The decimal number system is also called base-10, which is composed of digits from 0 to 9.

Let's say that position...