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)

Using readelf

A book on ELF binary analysis wouldn't be complete without one of the more well-known, and widely used tools such as readelf. We've covered this tool pretty extensively already in the previous chapters, but a little repetition will only help our memorization of the useful arguments this tool possesses. While this tool offers functionality that other tools also provide, having additional functionality at our disposal makes this tool the winner for giving us a go-to tool that provides a one-stop shop for all the information we could ever want when performing ELF binary analysis. Because of that, this recipe will be a little longer than the previous recipes in this chapter. The readelf tool provides so many useful arguments; therefore, we should take the time to learn them all.

If the title of this recipe didn't give it away already, we're going...