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.
Chapter 13. Decompilation
This chapter differs from the rest of this book in the sense that it does not discuss any practical reversing techniques, but instead it focuses on the inner workings of one of the most interesting reversing tools: the decompiler. If you are only interested in practical hands-on reversing techniques, this chapter is not for you. It was written for those who already understand the practical aspects of reversing and who would like to know more about how decompilers translate low-level representations into high-level representations. I personally think any reverser should have at least a basic understanding of decompilation techniques, and if only for this reason: Decompilers aim at automating many of the reversing techniques I've discussed throughout this book.
This chapter discusses both native code decompilation and decompilation of bytecode languages such as MSIL, but the focus is on native code decompilation because unlike bytecode decompilation, native code decompilation presents a huge challenge that hasn't really been met so far. The text covers the decompilation process and its various stages, while constantly demonstrating some of the problems typically encountered by native code decompilers.
Native Code Decompilation: An Unsolvable Problem?
Compilation is a more or less well-defined task. A program source file is analyzed and is checked for syntactic validity based on (hopefully) very strict language specifications. From this high-level representation, ...
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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.