Reverse-Engineering
Books
- The IDA Pro Book, 2nd Edition by Chris Eagle
- Reverse Engineering Code with IDA Pro by Dan Kaminsky et al
- Practical Malware Analysis by Michael Sikorski
- Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering by Eldad Eilam
- Crackproof Your Software by Pavol Cerven
- Surreptitious Software: Obfuscation, Watermarking, and Tamperproofing for Software Protection
- Wikibooks Subject:Software_reverse_engineering
Resources
- Reverse-Engineering on StackExchange
- OpenRCE
- Hex Blog
- http://www.reverse-engineering.info
- Automating RE with Python (slides) by Carlos Prado
- Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer Manuals
Static Analysis Tools
IDA Pro
IDA Pro combines an interactive, programmable, multi-processor disassembler coupled to a local and remote debugger and augmented by a complete plugin programming environment.
- Official page
- Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
- x86-32, x86-64, ARM and many others
- ELF, Java bytecode, Dalvik, ARM,...
- disassembler, some debugger
- extensible through plugins & python (anti-debugger, findcrypt,...)
- IDA toolbag
- IDAscope
- patchdiff2
- Zynamics bindiff
- DarunGrim, another binary diff tool, opensource but discontinued?
- x86emu, x86 Emulator plugin. Windows, Linux, OS X
- Plugin contests 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009
Hex-Rays
The most expensivepowerful IDA Pro plugin is the Hex-Rays decompiler
- x86 and ARM
- decompiler
Limitations specific to ARM:
- floating point instructions are not supported
- VFP/SIMD/Neon/... instructions are not supported
- functions having an argument that is passed partially on registers and partially on the stack are not supported (e.g. int64 passed in R3 and on the stack)
REC Studio
- x86, x64
- Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
- HLA disassembler
Useful commands:
help strings calltree showprocs decompile /tmp/myprog.c
click on a function in the "Project" function list to HLA disass it
Radare
The reverse engineering framework
Misc
Distorm
diStorm3 is really a decomposer, which means it takes an instruction and returns a binary structure which describes it rather than static text, this is great for advanced binary code analysis
PyPEELF
PyPEELF is a multi-platform binary editor written in Python, wxPython and BOA Constructor. It allows you to manage binary data in PE32, PE32+ (x64) and ELF binary files.
PyPEELF uses pefile to manage PE32 and PE32+ files and pyelf to manage ELF files. Besides, it uses winappdbg and pydasm in some others features like Task Running Viewer and Disassembling files.
PyPEELF was designed for Reverse Engineers who want to edit or visualize binary file data in multi-platforms. That is why PyPEELF runs under Windows and Unix/BSD operating systems
Poor man's tools
File, -z to uncompress, -s to inspect non-files, e.g. /dev/sda1
file -k [-z] [-s] mybin
Strings
strings [-n min_length] -a -e [s|S|b|l|B|L] mybin
ELF
man elf
readelf
readelf -a -g -t --dyn-syms -W mybin
elfedit
objdump
objdump -C -g -F -x -T --special-syms mybin objdump -d -l -r -R -S mybin objdump -D -l -r -R -S mybin
nm
nm -a -C -S -s --special-syms mybin
ldd
Shared library dependencies:
ldd -v mybin
PE
Pefile
A Python module to read and work with PE (Portable Executable) files, see usage examples
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys, pefile
pe = pefile.PE(sys.argv[1])
pe.dump_info()
open('out.txt', 'w').write(pe.dump_info())
Can run under Linux
PEiD
Can run with Wine
PETools
Can run with Wine
Resource Hacker
Can run with Wine
Dependency Walker
Can run with Wine
PEview
Can run with Wine
DLL Export Viewer
Can run with Wine
Under Wine, require absolute path to DLL so: click on gears, "load functions from the following DLL file", Browse
PEBrowse Pro
Can run with Wine
Explorer Suite
- CFF Explorer: Allows also to modify a PE
- Signature Explorer
- PE Detective
- Task Explorer (32 & 64)
PE Insider
Dynamic Analysis Tools
IDA Pro
IDA Pro has some debugging capabilities too.
Local debugging: win32, windbg
Remote debugging:
gdbserver --multi <client_ip>:<port> # default IDA port: 23946
Then on IDA: select Remote GDB debugger, paths should be paths on the gdbserver host.
Tuning:
- Debugger / options / Stop on process entry point
- Compatible with lib preloading, cf below
Intel PIN tools
- Official page
- Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android
- x86-32, x86-64 (only Intel platforms obviously)
- binary instrumentation
The best way to think about Pin is as a "just in time" (JIT) compiler. The input to this compiler is not bytecode, however, but a regular executable. Pin intercepts the execution of the first instruction of the executable and generates ("compiles") new code for the straight line code sequence starting at this instruction. It then transfers control to the generated sequence. The generated code sequence is almost identical to the original one, but Pin ensures that it regains control when a branch exits the sequence. After regaining control, Pin generates more code for the branch target and continues execution. Pin makes this efficient by keeping all of the generated code in memory so it can be reused and directly branching from one sequence to another. In JIT mode, the only code ever executed is the generated code. The original code is only used for reference. When generating code, Pin gives the user an opportunity to inject their own code (instrumentation).
Vdb/Vtrace / Vivisect
- debugger, static analysis
- Windows, Linux, Android
- Intel, ARM
vtrace is a cross-platform process debugging API implemented in python, and vdb is a debugger which uses it
vivisect is a Python based static analysis and emulation framework
Cuckoo Sandboxing
Currently only supporting Windows binaries.
Cuckoo Sandbox is a malware analysis system. You can throw any suspicious file at it and in a matter of seconds Cuckoo will provide you back some detailed results outlining what such file did when executed inside an isolated environment.
Cuckoo generates a handful of different raw data which include:
- Native functions and Windows API calls traces
- Copies of files created and deleted from the filesystem
- Dump of the memory of the selected process
- Full memory dump of the analysis machine
- Screenshots of the desktop during the execution of the malware analysis
- Network dump generated by the machine used for the analysis
ELF
ltrace/strace
Tracing library calls and system calls.
Getting a summary:
ltrace -f -S mybin 2>&1|grep '(.*)'|sed 's/(.*//'|sort|uniq -c
Getting more:
ltrace -f -i -S -n 4 -s 1024 mybin
Lib preloading
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
// Kill nanosleep()
int nanosleep(const struct timespec *req, struct timespec *rem){
printf("\n==== In our own nanosleep(), I dunnah want sleep\n");
return 0;
}
// Kill usleep()
int usleep(useconds_t usec){
printf("\n==== In our own usleep(), I dunnah want sleep\n");
return 0;
}
// Fix time()
time_t time(time_t *t){
printf("\n==== In our own time(), will return 1380120175\n");
return 1380120175;
}
// Fix srand()
void srand(unsigned int seed){
printf("\n==== In our own srand(), will do srand(0)\n");
void (*original_srand)(unsigned int seed);
original_srand = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "srand");
unsigned int myseed = 0;
return (*original_srand)(myseed);
}
#if 0
// Kill rand()
int rand(void){
printf("\n==== In our own rand(), will return 0\n");
return 0;
}
#else
// Intercept rand()
int rand(void){
int (*original_rand)(void);
original_rand = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "rand");
int r = (*original_rand)();
printf("\n==== In our own rand(), will return %04X\n", r);
return r;
}
#endif
gcc -fPIC -shared -Wl,-soname,patch -o patch.so patch.c -ldl export LD_PRELOAD=patch.so export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PE
Process Monitor
Process Explorer
RegShot
Computes diff between two registry snapshots
HeapMemView
WinAppDbg
The WinAppDbg python module allows developers to quickly code instrumentation scripts in Python under a Windows environment.
Tracer.py
Based on WinAppDbg, finds interesting bits in trace by dichotomy signal/noise
- run first time and try everything but not the interesting stuff -> use noise option
- then run again and try interesting stuff -> use signal option
WTFDLL.py
Find libraries loaded at runtime and the functions called