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)

Automating methodology tasks

When approaching anything, I'm a firm believer in the automate what you can mindset. For our methodology, we can certainly automate some of the tasks and commands by writing our own scripts to do so. This can be done in Bash or by using a language such as Python and as long as we make sure to format any output in a way that makes it easier for us to review, we can save ourselves a bit of time. The discovery phase would be a little challenging to automate, so when we refer to automation, we are referring to any information-gathering and static analysis phases of the methodology.

We will focus on writing a script that automates the information gathering and static analysis phases of this methodology using Bash. If we chose, and if we wanted more control over the output, we could write this in Python, Perl, or really any scripting language we are...