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)

Linux executable – hello world


To begin with, let's create a hello world program. Before anything else, we need to make sure that the tools required to build it are installed. Open a Terminal (the Terminal is Linux's version of Windows' Command Prompt) and enter the following command. This may require you to enter your super user password:

sudo apt install gcc

The C program compiler, gcc, is usually pre-installed in Linux.

Open any text editor and type the lines of following code, saving it as hello.c:

#include <stdio.h>
void main(void)
{
    printf ("hello world!\n");
}

You can use vim as your text editor by running vi from the Terminal.   

To compile and run the program, use the following commands:

The hello file is our Linux executable that displays a message in the console.

Now, on to reversing this program.

dlroW olleH

As an example of good practice, the process of reversing a program first needs to start with proper identification. Let's start with file:

It is a 32-bit ELF file-type. ELF...