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 objdump

Another tool with many uses is objdump, and as we'll see in this recipe, it has functionality that overlaps with other tools we've already learned and will learn about later in this chapter. Nonetheless, the primary use of this tool in many analysts' arsenal is for disassembling an object file. However, not to be outdone by readelf, we can use objdump to provide the same information about our binary, albeit output in a different format. This tool is extremely useful during the information gathering phase and the static analysis phase of the methodology we learned about in the previous chapter.

We've already seen some of the more common arguments for objdump when we worked through the recipes in the previous chapter, so as we dive into this recipe, we'll try to minimize repetition. However, some of the arguments are worth repeating as we will...