Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering

Chapter 2. Low-Level Software

This chapter provides an introduction to low-level software, which is a critical aspect of the field of reverse engineering. Low-level software is a general name for the infrastructural aspects of the software world. Because the low-level aspects of software are often the only ones visible to us as reverse engineers, we must develop a firm understanding of these layers that together make up the realm of low-level software.

This chapter opens with a very brief overview of the conventional, high-level perspective of software that every software developer has been exposed to. We then proceed to an introduction of low-level software and demonstrate how fundamental high-level software concepts map onto the low-level realm. This is followed by an introduction to assembly language, which is a key element in the reversing process and an important part of this book. Finally, we introduce several auxiliary low-level software topics that can assist in low-level software comprehension: compilers and software execution environments.

If you are an experienced software developer, parts of this chapter might seem trivial, particularly the high-level perspectives in the first part of this chapter. If that is the case, it is recommended that you start reading from the section titled "Low-Level Perspectives" later in this chapter, which provides a low-level perspective on familiar software development concepts.

High-Level Perspectives

Let's review some basic software development ...