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 ltrace and strace

Technically speaking, we could stop our analysis since we understand how this ELF binary works. However, we're going to dive into dynamic analysis so that we make sure we understand how to use the various tools we have at our disposal. It's important to remember that dynamic analysis involves running the binary and interacting with it while it is running. If this were destructive malware of some sort, and there's a valid argument that a bind shell is considered a form of malware, we would want to make sure dynamic analysis took place in a sandbox environment to avoid infecting production systems. For the purposes of this recipe, our virtual machine will be sufficient as we're focusing on learning the skills and not necessarily analyzing an actual attack against our organization.

As the title of this recipe suggests, we'll use dynamic...