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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned what a binary file is and how it can be dichotomously classified as a raw binary or a formatted binary, and you also learned that any formatted binary is also a raw binary.

You learned skills for Ghidra file importing by loading both raw binaries and formatted binaries. This new skill allows you to configure better options when loading a file and manually perform some adjustments if necessary.

You also learned about the old-style DOS executable format by producing a hello world program from scratch written in assembly language and later analyzing it with a hexadecimal editor.

Finally, you learned how to extend Ghidra with new loaders and filesystems, allowing you to import unsupported and exoteric binary formats and archive files. You learned this by analyzing the old-style DOS executable format loader, a good real-world example to start with.

In the next chapter, we will cover an advanced topic in Ghidra, which is processor module development...