Skip to Main Content
x86 Software Reverse-Engineering, Cracking, and Counter-Measures
book

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

by Stephanie Domas, Christopher Domas
February 2024
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
320 pages
6h 45m
English
Wiley
Content preview from x86 Software Reverse-Engineering, Cracking, and Counter-Measures

CHAPTER 16Advanced Techniques

Up to this point, this book has covered the core tools and skills used for reverse engineering and cracking. However, this is an evolving field, and new methods are being developed to make it faster and easier. This section describes at a high level some advanced techniques and tools on the cutting edge of reverse engineering. Our goal with this chapter is that if at this point you're still loving software cracking and looking to take it even further to the next level, we want to present you with a plethora of rabbit holes to go down. Depending on what interests you, we hope the following will point you in the right directions to go deeper.

Timeless Debugging

Timeless debugging is also known as reverse debugging. The core idea is: “what if we could go backwards when debugging?”

Consider the case where something went wrong while debugging. Maybe a patch failed, you missed an anti-debug check, you don't know how you got here, etc.

There are a few different tools designed for timeless debugging, including the following:

  • Visual Studio Ultimate (.NET)
  • rr
  • gdb

To get started, check out George Hotz @ Enigma in his 2016 USENIX Enigma talk at www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGl6kpSajag.

Binary Instrumentation

Binary instrumentation is when you inject code to watch or modify a process as it executes. This can be useful for finding memory leaks, tracing key checks, performing anti-anti-debugging, etc.

Some tools for binary instrumentation include the following: ...

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.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Practical Reverse Engineering: x86, x64, ARM, Windows Kernel, Reversing Tools, and Obfuscation

Practical Reverse Engineering: x86, x64, ARM, Windows Kernel, Reversing Tools, and Obfuscation

Bruce Dang, Alexandre Gazet, Elias Bachaalany, Sébastien Josse

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781394199884Purchase Link