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

Tools – builder and debugger


Before we proceed with more instructions, it would be best to try actually programming with assembly language. The tools we will need are a text editor, the assembly code builder, and the debugger.

Popular assemblers

All programming languages need to be built to become an executable on the system platform that the program was built for. Unless you want to enter each opcode byte in a binary file, developers have made tools to convert that source code to an executable that contains code that the machine can understand. Let's take a look at some of the most popular assembly language builders today.

MASM

Also known as Microsoft Macro Assembler, MASM has been around for more than 30 years. It is maintained by Microsoft and is part of the Visual Studio product. It was developed for compiling x86 source code to executable code. 

Compiling takes two steps: compiling the source into an object file, then linking all necessary modules required by the object file into a single...