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)

Changing a binary's signature

It may come as no surprise that there are options for changing a binary's signature, and we should recognize when some of those options are employed in binaries we're analyzing manually. We will focus on the analysis of one technique in more depth in the next chapter, but, for now, let's learn a few ways to change a binary's signature. We'll actually employ a technique we learned about in an Chapter 5, Linux Tools for Binary Analysis, to accomplish our goal.

For this recipe, we'll try to change the binary's signature so that the signature detection Python script doesn't detect the signatures in the altered binary. We can use the output from the previous recipe to understand the signatures that the script is looking for. Specifically, we'll want to tackle the bytes 48 83 C0 3B and see if we can come...