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)

Static and Dynamic Reversing

Like a patient in a hospital, a file needs to undergo some triage to determine the right allocation of resources. The result of the file assessment will tell us what tools need to be used, what kind of reversing steps need to be taken, and what resources will be used. The steps involved in carrying out reversing are categorized into static and dynamic analysis. 

In this chapter, we will introduce the methods and tools used in assessing a file. We will be focusing on a 32-bit Windows operating system for our examples. This will be followed by an examination of tools we can use for static and dynamic analysis. This chapter can help you to generate a checklist that will serve as a guide for you to retrieve all information on a file in the least amount of time.

In this chapter, you will do the following: 

  • Gain an understanding of Target...