Practical Malware Analysis

Levels of Abstraction

In traditional computer architecture, a computer system can be represented as several levels of abstraction that create a way of hiding the implementation details. For example, you can run the Windows OS on many different types of hardware, because the underlying hardware is abstracted from the OS.

Figure 4-1 shows the three coding levels involved in malware analysis. Malware authors create programs at the high-level language level and use a compiler to generate machine code to be run by the CPU. Conversely, malware analysts and reverse engineers operate at the low-level language level; we use a disassembler to generate assembly code that we can read and analyze to figure out how a program operates.

Figure 4-1. Code level examples ...