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)

Identifying hard coded credentials with a debugger

Continuing with dynamic analysis, we'll turn our attention to using a debugger to identify hardcoded credentials. Instead of using GDB, however, we'll use Evan's Debugger (EDB) because of the advantages of having a nice graphical user interface in this situation. The GUI will make it easier to identify poorly obfuscated passwords, and as we'll see in later recipes, it will also make it easier to validate the format string vulnerability and the buffer overflow vulnerability.

We're going to use EDB to identify and validate hardcoded credentials in this binary. We'll keep this recipe short and concise on purpose since we have a very focused task for this recipe. We saw in previous recipes that the hardcoded credentials are handled in a character array, using the hexadecimal representation of each character...