April 2005
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
16h 18m
English
Content preview from Reversing: Secrets of Reverse EngineeringBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Appendix C. Deciphering Program Data
It would be safe to say that any properly designed program is designed around data. What kind of data must the program manage? What would be the most accurate and efficient representation of that data within the program? These are really the most basic questions that any skilled software designer or developer must ask.
The same goes for reversing. To truly understand a program, reversers must understand its data. Once the general layout and purpose of the program's key data structures are understood, specific code area of interest will be relatively easy to decipher.
This appendix covers a variety of topics related to low-level data management in a program. I start out by describing the stack and how it is used by programs and proceed to a discussion of the most basic data constructs used in programs, such as variables, and so on. The next section deals with how data is laid out in memory and describes (from a low-level perspective) common data constructs such as arrays and other types of lists. Finally, I demonstrate how classes are implemented in low-level and how they can be identified while reversing.
The Stack
The stack is basically a continuous chunk of memory that is organized into virtual "layers" by each procedure running in the system. Memory within the stack is used for the lifetime duration of a function and is freed (and can be reused) once that function returns.
The following sections demonstrate how stacks are arranged and describe ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.