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

Summary


Assembly language is a low-level language that uses instructions to communicate directly with the computer system. Logic used in computers is based on an on-and-off concept, from which binary 1s and 0s were derived. We have learned how to read and write binary from various number bases, and how to do arithmetic and bitwise computations.

We introduced popular assemblers and debuggers that we can use to build and validate our program. Then, we used FASM to code and build our Win32 low-level hello world program that uses APIs to communicate with the kernel. We validated our built executable program using x64dbg to debug it. Debugging our hello world program is a good start for us to get introduced to the world of reverse engineering.

Practice makes perfect. We have a listed a few suggested programs that can be developed using assembly language.

Knowing the lowest level of a code is a good start for our reverse engineering journey. As you finish up this book, assembly language will feel...