Book Image

Ghidra Software Reverse Engineering for Beginners

By : A. P. David
Book Image

Ghidra Software Reverse Engineering for Beginners

By: A. P. David

Overview of this book

Ghidra, an open source software reverse engineering (SRE) framework created by the NSA research directorate, enables users to analyze compiled code on any platform, whether Linux, Windows, or macOS. This book is a starting point for developers interested in leveraging Ghidra to create patches and extend tool capabilities to meet their cybersecurity needs. You'll begin by installing Ghidra and exploring its features, and gradually learn how to automate reverse engineering tasks using Ghidra plug-ins. You’ll then see how to set up an environment to perform malware analysis using Ghidra and how to use it in the headless mode. As you progress, you’ll use Ghidra scripting to automate the task of identifying vulnerabilities in executable binaries. The book also covers advanced topics such as developing Ghidra plug-ins, developing your own GUI, incorporating new process architectures if needed, and contributing to the Ghidra project. By the end of this Ghidra book, you’ll have developed the skills you need to harness the power of Ghidra for analyzing and avoiding potential vulnerabilities in code and networks.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Ghidra
6
Section 2: Reverse Engineering
12
Section 3: Extending Ghidra

Understanding memory corruption vulnerabilities

There are a lot of types of software vulnerabilities. In an effort to categorize software weakness types, arose the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). If you want to know what kind of vulnerabilities exist, I recommend you check out the entire list, which you can find at https://cwe.mitre.org/data/index.html.

We will be focusing on memory corruption vulnerabilities. This kind of vulnerability happens when a program tries to access a memory region without having access privileges to it.

These kinds of vulnerabilities are typical in the C/C++ programming languages because a programmer has direct memory access, allowing us to commit memory access mistakes. They are not possible in the Java programming language, which is considered a memory-safe programming language because its runtime error detection checks and prevents such errors, although the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is also susceptible to memory corruption vulnerabilities (https...