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)

Introducing common IA64 instructions

When it comes to IA64, the good news is that we don't have to necessarily learn a whole new instruction set. The downside to that is that we may have to remember some of the slight changes we make to some of the instructions we know and love, especially with the legacy 8-bit high registers and 8-bit low registers we mentioned in the previous recipe.

We also have more registers at our disposal to hold data, and each register can hold more data than it can in IA32. This is all something to keep in mind as we look over some of the common instructions in IA64 and compare them to what we learned about in the IA32 recipe earlier in this chapter.

For this recipe, we will familiarize ourselves with using instructions we've already learned but with our new registers and their new bit width. We will also cover some important labeling options...