- Into the House of Logic
- Should Reverse Engineering Be Illegal?
- Reverse Engineering Tools and Concepts
- Approaches to Reverse Engineering
- Methods of the Reverser
- Writing Interactive Disassembler (IDA) Plugins
- Decompiling and Disassembling Software
- Decompilation in Practice: Reversing helpctr.exe
- Automatic, Bulk Auditing for Vulnerabilities
- Writing Your Own Cracking Tools
- Building a Basic Code Coverage Tool
- Conclusion
Conclusion
All software is made up of machine-readable code. In fact, code is what makes every program function the way it does. The code defines the software and the decisions it will make. Reverse engineering, as applied to software, is the process of looking for patterns in this code. By identifying certain code patterns, an attacker can locate potential software vulnerabilities.
This chapter has exposed you to the basic concepts and methods of decompilation, all in the name of better understanding how a program really works. We've even gone so far as to provide some rudimentary (yet still powerful) tools as examples. Using these methods and tools, you can learn almost anything you need to know about a target, and then use this information to exploit it.