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

After Hello


We encountered an external call to the printf and ExitProcess API functions. These specific functions were developed for Windows as a means of communication between the user-mode and the kernel-mode. Generally, for most operating systems, the kernel is responsible for literally displaying the output on the monitor, writing files to the disk, reading keyboard strokes, transmitting data to USB ports, sending data to the printer, transmitting data to the network wire, and so forth. In essence, everything that has something to do with hardware has to go through the kernel. Our program, however, is in the user-mode, and we use the APIs to tell the kernel to do stuff for us.

Calling APIs

Calling APIs within our program just requires us to define the library file where the API function is, and the API name itself. As we did with our Hello World program, we import the API function by setting it up in the import section:

section '.idata' import data readable writeable     ; import section...