Reversing - Secrets Of Reverse Engineering

[neupara 1]

Wiley Publishing, Inc. | ISBN 13: 978-0-7645-7481-8 | English | PDF | 619 Pages | 8.4 MB

 

Introduction

Welcome to Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering. This book was written after years of working on software development projects that repeatedly required reverse engineering of third party code, for a variety of reasons. At first this was a fairly tedious process that was only performed when there was simply no alternative means of getting information. Then all of a sudden, a certain mental barrier was broken and I found myself rapidly sifting through undocumented machine code, quickly deciphering its meaning and getting the answers I wanted regarding the code’s function and purpose. At that point it dawned on me that this was a remarkably powerful skill, because it meant that I could fairly easily get answers to any questions I had regarding software I was working with, even when I had no access to the relevant documentation or to the source code of the program in question. This book is about providing knowledge and techniques to allow anyone with a decent understanding of software to do just that. The

idea is simple: we should develop a solid understanding of low-level software, and learn techniques that will allow us to easily dig into any program’s binaries and retrieve information. Not sure why a system behaves the way it does and no one else has the answers? No problem—dig into it on your own and find out. Sounds scary and unrealistic? It’s not, and this is the very purpose of this book, to teach and demonstrate reverse engineering techniques that can be applied daily, for solving a wide variety of problems. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For those of you that haven’t been exposed to the concept of software reverse engineering, a little introduction is in order. Before we get into the various topics discussed throughout this book, we should formally introduce its primary subject: reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is a process where an engineered artifact (such as a car, a jet engine, or a software program) is deconstructed in a way that reveals its innermost details, such as its design and

architecture. This is similar to scientific research that studies natural phenomena, with the difference that no one commonly refers to scientific research as reverse engineering, simply because no one knows for sure whether or not nature was ever engineered. In the software world reverse engineering boils down to taking an existing program for which source-code or proper documentation is not available and attempting to recover details regarding its’ design and implementation. In some cases source code is available but the original developers who created it are unavailable. This book deals specifically with what is commonly referred to as binary reverse engineering. Binary reverse engineering techniques aim at extracting valuable information from programs for which source code in unavailable. In some cases it is possible to recover the actual source-code (or a similar high-level representation) from the program binaries, which greatly simplifies the task because reading code presented in a high-level language is far easier than reading low-level assembly language code. In other cases we end up with a fairly cryptic assembly language listing that describes the program. This book explains this process and why things work this way, while describing in detail how to decipher the program’s code in a variety of different environment

 

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Edited June 11, 2009 by neupara