Free Online Book Explains Reverse Engineering

Lifehack writes "There is a good online book available for reverse engineering software: 'This book is an attempt to provide an introduction to reverse engineering software under both Linux and Microsoft Windows. Since reverse engineering is under legal fire, the authors figure the best response is to make the knowledge widespread...'"

Comments

Extremely lightweight

[Salamander]

The article (I refuse to call it a book) doesn't really even scratch the surface of what you need to know to do any serious reverse engineering. Yes, it covers some basics of things like debuggers and executable formats, but that's what man pages and header files are for. It doesn't even get as far as telling you how to tell you how to navigate through a simple dispatch table or loader stub, which are often used without any deliberate intent to obfuscate. If you want to tell people about true reverse engineering you should at least try to explain things like dynamically constructed dispatch tables, self-modifying code, and exception handlers used to implement on-the-fly decryption or decompression. Since the world has become so network-centric, a decent description of how to reverse-engineer protocols as well as code should also be considered a minimum requirement. Lacking all of these things, the cited article will leave the reader very little better off than they had been before in terms of actually puzzling out what something does or how it works.