x86 Software Reverse-Engineering, Cracking, and Counter-Measures

CHAPTER 11Patching and Advanced Tooling

The previous chapter introduced software cracking and patching. This chapter provides a more in-depth look at patching and some of the more advanced tools that can be used for reversing and cracking.

Patching in 010 Editor

It is often useful to be able to view and edit the hex of a file. If you've ever tried to open a binary in a text editor, you saw a lot of crazy symbols and blank space. This is because the text editor is trying to interpret everything in the file as ASCII, which it's not. Instead, we need an editor that will display as hex, not ASCII. There are many different hex editors capable of doing this. One of our favorites is 010 Editor. (Find links in the Tools section of our GitHub site at https://github.com/DazzleCatDuo/X86-SOFTWARE-REVERSE-ENGINEERING-CRACKING-AND-COUNTER-MEASURES).

Open any file (executable, data file, image, music, etc.) to view its hex. Figure 11.1 shows a sample executable in 010 Editor.

Figure 11.2 shows the Inspector pane. This shows the various different possible interpretations of the data at your cursor.

Figure 11.1: Viewing a file in 010 Editor

Figure 11.2: Inspector pane in 010 Editor

If you know what you're looking for, you can search for it, as shown in Figure 11.3. You can search ...