Book Image

Binary Analysis Cookbook

By : Michael Born
Book Image

Binary Analysis Cookbook

By: Michael Born

Overview of this book

Binary analysis is the process of examining a binary program to determine information security actions. It is a complex, constantly evolving, and challenging topic that crosses over into several domains of information technology and security. This binary analysis book is designed to help you get started with the basics, before gradually advancing to challenging topics. Using a recipe-based approach, this book guides you through building a lab of virtual machines and installing tools to analyze binaries effectively. You'll begin by learning about the IA32 and ELF32 as well as IA64 and ELF64 specifications. The book will then guide you in developing a methodology and exploring a variety of tools for Linux binary analysis. As you advance, you'll learn how to analyze malicious 32-bit and 64-bit binaries and identify vulnerabilities. You'll even examine obfuscation and anti-analysis techniques, analyze polymorphed malicious binaries, and get a high-level overview of dynamic taint analysis and binary instrumentation concepts. By the end of the book, you'll have gained comprehensive insights into binary analysis concepts and have developed the foundational skills to confidently delve into the realm of binary analysis.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Performing static analysis

Since the initial phases of our methodology didn't yield much in terms of helpful results, we must move on to static analysis and see whether disassembling our binary will produce useful output. Our automation script took care of running objdump for us, so we just need to examine the output.

In this recipe, we'll review the objdump output, and see whether we can notice any differences between the two binaries. We might as well check to see whether our signature detection script from Chapter 9, Understanding Anti-Analysis Techniques, detects any signatures in the polymorphed binary too.

Getting ready

Before we can complete this recipe, we have to get make sure we have the correct virtual...