Hello Firends, As I posted on my Facebook Page “Bangash Hacker” that I will start tutorials on ‘Reverse Engineering’ or ‘Software Cracking’ so this is the first tutorial on Reverse Engineering and this it’s title is ‘Introduction to Reverse Engineering’.In this tutorial I will teach you that what is Reverse Engineering and what types of tools is used in Reverse Engineering.
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So lets start Reverse Engineering.
What is reverse engineering?
Reverse engineering is the process of taking a compiled
binary and attempting to recreate (or simply understand) the original way the
program works. A programmer initially writes a program, usually in a high-
level language such as C++ or C# or Visual Basic (or God forbid, Delphi) etc.
Because the computer does not inherently speak these languages, the code that
the programmer wrote is assembled into a more machine specific format, one to
which a computer does speak. This code is called, originally enough, machine
language. This code is not very human friendly,
and often times requires a great deal of brain power to figure out exactly
what the programmer had in mind.
What is reverse engineering used for?
Reverse engineering can be applied to many areas of computer
science, but here are a couple of generic categories;
- Making it possible to interface to legacy code (where you do not have the original code source).
- Breaking copy protection (ie. Impress your friends and save some $$ like Cracking IDM).
- Studying viris and malware.
- Evaluating software quality and robustness.
- Adding functionality to existing software.
d The first category is reverse engineering code to interface
with existing binaries when the source code is not available. I will not be
discussing this much, as it is boring.
The second category (and the biggest) is breaking copy
protection. This means disabling time trials, defeating registration, and
basically everything else to get commercial software for free. This we will be
discussing at great length.
The third category is studying virus and malware code.
Reverse engineering is required because not a lot of virus coders out there
don’t send instructions on how they wrote the code, what it is supposed to
accomplish, and how it will accomplish this (unless they are really dumb). This
is a pretty exciting field, but requires a great deal of knowledge. We will not
discuss this much until later on.
The fourth category is evaluating software security and
vulnerabilities. When creating large (think Windows Operating Systems), reverse
engineering is used to make sure that the system does not contain any major
vulnerabilities, security flaws, and frankly, to make it as hard as possible to
allow crackers to crack the software.
The final category is adding functionality to existing
software. Personally, I think this is one of the most fun. Don’t like the
graphics used in your web design software? Change them. Want to add a menu item
to encrypt your documents in your favorite word processor? Add it. Want to
annoy your co-workers to no end by adding derogatory message boxes to Windows
calculator? Let’s do it. This we will be getting into later in the series.
What knowledge is required?
As you can probably guess, a great deal of knowledge is
necessary to be an effective reverse engineer. Fortunately, a great deal of
knowledge is not necessary to ‘begin’ reverse engineering, and that’s where I
hope to come in. That being said, to have fun with reversing and to get
something out of these tutorials you should at least have a basic understanding
of how program flow works (for example, you should know what a basic if…then
statement does, what an array is, and have at least seen a hello world
program). Secondly, becoming familiar with Assembly Language is highly
suggested; You can get thru the tutorials without it, but at some point you
will want to become a guru at ASM to really know what you are doing. In
addition, a lot of your time will be devoted to learning how to use tools.
These tools are invaluable to a reverse engineer, but also require learning
each tool’s shortcuts, flaws and idiosyncrasies. Finally, reverse engineering
requires a significant amount of experimentation; playing with different
packers/protectors/encryption schemes, learning about programs originally
written in different programming languages (even Delphi), deciphering
anti-reverse engineering tricks…the list goes on and on. At the end of this
tutorial I have added a ‘further reading’ section with some suggested sources.
If you really want to get good at reversing, I highly suggest you do some
further reading.
What kinds of tools are used?
There are many different kinds of tools used in reversing.
Many are specific to the types of protection that must be overcome to reverse a
binary. There are also several that just make the reverser’s life easier. And
then some are what I consider the ‘staple’ items- the ones you use regularly.
For the most part, the tools fit into a couple categories:
1. Disassemblers
Disassemblers
attempt to take the machine language codes in the binary and display them in a
friendlier format. They also extrapolate data such as function calls, passed variables
and text strings. This makes the
executable look more like human-readable code as opposed to a bunch of numbers
strung together. There are many disassemblers out there, some of them
specializing in certain things (such as binaries written in Delphi). Mostly it
comes down to the one your most comfortable with. I invariably find myself
working with IDA (there is a free version available http://www.hex-rays.com/),
as well as a couple of lesser known ones that help in specific cases.
2. Debuggers
Debuggers
are the bread and butter for reverse engineers. They first analyze the binary,
much like a disassembler Debuggers then
allow the reverser to step through the code, running one line at a time and
investigating the results. This is invaluable to discover how a program works.
Finally, some debuggers allow certain instructions in the code to be changed
and then run again with these changes in place. Examples of debuggers are
Windbg and Ollydbg. I almost solely use Ollydbg (http://www.ollydbg.de/), unless
debugging kernel mode binaries, but we’ll get to that later.
3.Hex editors
Hex
editors allow you to view the actual bytes in a binary, and change them. They
also provide searching for specific bytes, saving sections of a binary to disk,
and much more. There are many free hex editors out there, and most of them are
fine. We won’t be using them a great deal in these tutorials, but sometimes
they are invaluable.
4. PE and resource viewers/editors
Every binary designed to run on a windows machine (and Linux for that
matter) has a very specific section of data at the beginning of it that tells
the operating system how to set up and initialize the program. It tells the OS
how much memory it will require, what support DLLs the program needs to borrow
code from, information about dialog boxes and such. This is called the Portable
Executable, and all programs designed to run on windows needs to have one.
In the world of reverse engineering, this structure of bytes becomes very
important, as it gives the reverser needed information about the binary.
Eventually, you will want to (or need to) change this information, either to
make the program do something different than what it was initially for, or to
change the program BACK into something it originally was (like before a protector
made the code really hard to understand). There are a plethora of PE viewers
and editors out there. I use CFF Explorer (http://www.ntcore.com/exsuite.php)
and LordPE (http://www.woodmann.com/collaborative/tools/index.php/LordPE), but
you can feel free to use whichever you’re comfortable with.
Most
files also have resource sections. These include graphics, dialog items, menu
items, icons and text strings. Sometimes you can have fun just by looking at
(and altering ) the resource sections.
I will show you an example at the end of this tutorial.
5. System Monitoring tools
When
reversing programs, it is sometimes important (and when studying virii and
malware, of the utmost importance) to see what changes an application makes to
the system; are there registry keys created or queried? are there .ini files
created? are separate processes created, perhaps to thwart reverse engineering
of the application? Examples of system monitoring tools are procmon, regshot,
and process hacker. We will discuss these later in the tutorial.
6. Miscellaneous tools and information
There
are tools we will pick up along the way, such as scripts, unpackers, packer
identifiers etc. Also in this category is some sort of reference to the Windows
API. This API is huge, and at times, complicated. It is extremely helpful in
reverse engineering to know exactly what called functions are doing.
7. Enjoy.....
This was simple introduction to Reverse Engineering and on
my next tutorial I will show how crack Windows default Calculator and change
the menus and buttons etc and impress you friends that you can change &
crack software......
