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

Automation tools


Developing our own programs to do analysis may sometimes be a must. For example, if the program contains a decryption algorithm, we can develop a separate program that can run the same algorithm that may be used for similar programs with the same decryption algorithm. If we wanted to identify variants of the file we were analyzing, we could automate the identification for incoming files using one of the following:

  • Python: This scriptinglanguageis popularbecauseof it availability across multiple platforms. It is pre-installed in Linux operating systems;compiledbinaries for Windows can be downloaded fromhttps://www.python.org/
  • Yara: A tool and language from the developers of VirusTotal. It is capable of searching the contents of files for a set of binary or text signatures. Its most common application is in searching for malware remnants in a compromised system.
  • Visual Studio: A piece of Microsoft software for coding and building programs. It can be used by reverse engineers...