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

Encrypted data identification


One of the main features of antivirus software is to detect malware using signatures. Signatures are sets of byte sequences unique to a given piece of malware. Although this detection technique is not thought of as effective for anti-virus nowadays, it may still play a vital role in detecting files, especially when an operating system is taken offline.

Simple signature detection can easily be defeated by encrypting the data and/or code of a malware. The effect would be that a new signature gets developed from a unique portion of the encrypted data. An attacker can simply re-encrypt the same malware using a different key, which would result in another signature. But still, the malware runs with the same behavior.

Of course, anti-virus software has made great improvements to defeat this technique, thereby making signature detection a technology of the past.

On the other hand, this is an obfuscation technique that eats up additional time for reversing software. Under...