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 binary discovery

One of the important aspects of binary analysis is the ability to discover unknown binaries on a system, or to discover when a known binary has been replaced with one using the same name. There are a plethora of methods we could use, some open source, others commercial, but since the scope of this book is to focus on the tools freely available to us, we will embrace the power of the Linux Terminal. Everything in this recipe will work on both the 32-bit Ubuntu virtual machine and the 64-bit Ubuntu virtual machine we created in Chapter 1, Setting Up the Lab. Feel free to use either virtual machine to complete this recipe and future recipes in this chapter.

In this recipe, we will employ the following tools to perform binary discovery on our systems. I want to reiterate that this is by no means a complete list. We will cover all of these tools in depth...