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johnsfine 01-28-2013 07:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jokar.mohsen (Post 4878805)
I want to Learn assembly langauge for Reverse engineering, Do you have any idea?

I don't want to discourage learning asm. But reverse engineering methods that involve asm level work are an enormous amount of effort (even after you are an asm expert) for very little benefit, and even then much of the benefit would likely be illegal.

If you still want to learn asm for reverse engineering, then the choice of architecture is determined by what you want to reverse engineer. Also the choice of what approach you take to asm is influenced by what you want to reverse engineer.

If you want to reverse engineer any kind of ordinary programs, then you need to start with learning how to write asm functions callable from C (as I suggested earlier).

Some asm tutorials start from boot code, which is a very specialized topic and useless if you want to reverse engineer anything other than boot code.

Most other asm tutorials start with tiny whole programs, which also involves a lot of specialized, but otherwise useless, information. Before you understand those topics, you might imagine reverse engineering whole programs requires that knowledge. But it actually doesn't. The techniques used when the whole program must be asm don't appear anywhere in the compiled code when the main program is in a high level language. Something similar might appear in the compiled code of the basic system .so or .a files (.lib or .dll in Windows) the executable was linked against. But you don't need to reverse engineer those. You have their C source code.

I did a quick search for my previous replies to related questions that I think are relevant for you. I found this post
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...9/#post4661549
I found a whole lot of useful posts in this thread
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...rn-asm-793174/

jokar.mohsen 01-28-2013 08:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnsfine (Post 4879013)
I don't want to discourage learning asm. But reverse engineering methods that involve asm level work are an enormous amount of effort (even after you are an asm expert) for very little benefit, and even then much of the benefit would likely be illegal.

If you still want to learn asm for reverse engineering, then the choice of architecture is determined by what you want to reverse engineer. Also the choice of what approach you take to asm is influenced by what you want to reverse engineer.

If you want to reverse engineer any kind of ordinary programs, then you need to start with learning how to write asm functions callable from C (as I suggested earlier).

Some asm tutorials start from boot code, which is a very specialized topic and useless if you want to reverse engineer anything other than boot code.

Most other asm tutorials start with tiny whole programs, which also involves a lot of specialized, but otherwise useless, information. Before you understand those topics, you might imagine reverse engineering whole programs requires that knowledge. But it actually doesn't. The techniques used when the whole program must be asm don't appear anywhere in the compiled code when the main program is in a high level language. Something similar might appear in the compiled code of the basic system .so or .a files (.lib or .dll in Windows) the executable was linked against. But you don't need to reverse engineer those. You have their C source code.

I want to do Malware analysis, Do you have any suggestion?

johnsfine 01-28-2013 08:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jokar.mohsen (Post 4879025)
I want to do Malware analysis, Do you have any suggestion?

x86-64, not 32-bit x86 nor any other (more obsolete) architecture. Use of 32-bit is declining and you are still learning.

If you learn x86-64 quickly, you can go back and learn the differences between that and 32-bit. Both are still relevant for malware analysis if you learn a lot soon.

Beyond that, what I said earlier still applies. For understanding most malware the first and most important aspect of asm to understand is the mechanism by which one function calls another, including how parameters are passed, how local variables are allocated by the new function, what registers are preserved, how results are returned, and how everything unwinds correctly (or not) during the return.

dugan 01-28-2013 09:40 AM

Reverse engineering? I haven't read this book, but gets its fair share of recommendations: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0764574817

ButterflyMelissa 01-28-2013 01:00 PM

Edited stuff out - irrelevant ranting, not usefull for OP, sorry gang... :)
(excusing myself from this thread...)

jokar.mohsen 01-29-2013 05:21 AM

Thank you So much

sundialsvcs 01-29-2013 08:05 AM

Oh, heck ... maybe I'm just an old mainframe-junkie at heart who learned IBM Assembler early-on and did a lot of work with it ... if your brain is "wire"d the right way, computer hardware architecture (seen from software's point-of-view) can be interesting.

Especially since pocket-protectors come in lots of sexy colors! (So do nerdy glasses.)

(what? what? why of course there is a "pocketprotectors.com"!) :hattip:

dugan 05-29-2013 04:05 PM

Impossible Programs: a great lecture on some of computer science's most important subjects - Boing Boing

Quote:

Here's a 40-minute video in which Tom Stuart gives a talk summarizing one of the chapters from him new book Understanding Computation, describing the halting state problem and how it relates to bugs, Turing machines, Turing completeness, computability, malware checking for various mobile app stores, and related subjects. The Halting State problem -- which relates to the impossibility of knowing what a program will do with all possible inputs -- is one of the most important and hardest-to-understand ideas in computer science, and Stuart does a fantastic job with it here. You don't need to be a master programmer or a computer science buff to get it, and even if you only absorb 50 percent of it, it's so engagingly presented, and so blazingly relevant to life in the 21st century, that you won't regret it.


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