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The IDA Pro Book
An anonymous reader writes "After attending DEFCON in August and seeing the overwhelming interest in this book, I was eager to dive into The IDA Pro Book by Chris Eagle. Chris Eagle's team, School of Root, won the 'Capture the Flag' event at DEFCON this year and Chris gave a presentation on CollabREate, a tool that integrates with IDA Pro to allow collaboration in reverse engineering (RE). All of that — together with the fact that the book sold out — screamed that this book should quickly make it to the top of my list." This review originally appeared on The Ethical Hacker Network.
The IDA Pro Book
author
Chris Eagle
pages
640
publisher
No Starch Press
rating
9/10
reviewer
Ryan Linn
ISBN
1593271786
summary
An information-packed guide to IDA
Once I had the book in-hand, the cover alone offered some insight into what was to come. The quote on the front of the book is an endorsement from the creator of IDA Pro. The image on the front is a throwback to the Operation game by Milton Bradley, which reminds me of how I felt when I got started doing reverse engineering. I am not a professional Reverse Engineer or Malware Analyst; however, my coding background and my current position as a security professional at SAS affords the opportunity to dabble. This puts me in the perfect middle ground of being able to understand the material as well as assess its ability to teach.
The IDA Pro Book is broken up into a number of different "Parts" each having several chapters and its own goal. Even if the content appears to be beyond your level of knowledge in a certain area, I highly recommend that you keep reading. It may also be handy to point out the fact that the book is 640 pages. So this lends itself to being more of a reference guide than a book read straight through from cover to cover.
I should also mention at this point that the book is about the 5.X tree of IDA Pro, and not the freeware version. There is a demo that you can download off of the IDA Pro Website if you aren't able to purchase the full version right away. In addition, there is a reference at the back discussing how the freeware version differs from the commercial version, so as long as you are ok with those restrictions while you are learning, this book still should be very handy.
One of the most important sections of Chris' book is found in "Introduction to IDA." The author discusses disassembly and the challenges that go with it, the tools involved with reverse engineering and disassembly, and a general breakdown of how these tools approach the binaries that they are analyzing. He also references other tools that are handy alongside IDA Pro, and outlines how they fit into the reverse engineering process. Finally information about IDA Pro licensing and installation is discussed, and the base information that you will need for the rest of your IDA Pro adventure is laid out.
Once the basics of RE have been covered, the author addresses the fundamentals of using IDA Pro. Unlike some other books, this book does a great job of letting you know where you should be looking when it lays out a block of assembly code. The references are well laid out as well. "Part II: Basic IDA Usage" progresses logically and eases you into the interface. It does a great job helping you figure out what all the new windows are doing, and how to get to the information that IDA Pro is providing. The content moves from basic skills such as finding the disassembly into manipulating the disassembly to be more meaningful then to optimizing the disassembly process. It shows you how to navigate the code, and how to incorporate other knowledge that you have about the binary you are disassembling, such as what headers or what libraries might have been used in order to obtain the most useful disassembly possible and facilitate the disassembly of the binary.
"Part III: Advanced IDA Usage" gets deeper into using IDA Pro, including utilizing the Fast Library Identification and Recognition Technology (FLIRT) signatures and custom files in order to suck the most information possible out of a binary before analysis. You also get a glimpse into how to modify the pieces of the application which can be modified only through config files. It concludes by explaining the patch capabilities of IDA Pro and discussing what the limitations and expectations should be. This Part provides insight into creating your own signatures for custom libraries that might not be available in IDA Pro, so, as you start working on real life applications, you can tailor IDA Pro to be able to recognize libraries that you frequently encounter.
After the basics of using the application have been covered, the author explains how to extend the capabilities of IDA Pro in Parts III and IV. He discusses in depth the scripting engine and how to build plug-ins and modules. Throughout this Part numerous examples are given of how the scripting and plug-ins fit into the application. Short detailed examples are used to illustrate how to accomplish some tasks that would be useful for a reverse engineer including listing out function information. The beginning of the chapter was great. As a beginning Reverse Engineer, I was able to clearly see how this information would apply. For the stuff that was beyond my current knowledge level, it was easy to see that as my knowledge progresses in the future, I would be back to re-visit this information.
Throughout the entire fifth Part are goodies focusing on the real-world applications of IDA Pro. It goes into the different types of binaries that you might encounter while doing reverse engineering. This chapter also goes into two large areas where IDA Pro is used such as obfuscated code analysis and vulnerability analysis. After reading this Part, you should have some handy scripts and a series of applications and plug-ins to aid in your RE adventures. The author discusses a number of those plug-ins in-depth including adding in bindings for Python and Ruby. At the end of this chapter, I hadn't learned an incredible amount more about IDA Pro; however I definitely knew more about how to approach the problems I might encounter and how to extend IDA Pro's capabilities in order to tackle real world tasks.
The final Part of the book is on the IDA Debugger. The debugging features of IDA Pro were an afterthought and aren't the primary focus of IDA Pro. Chris Eagle goes into what to expect from the debugger, how it's used, and then finally how to integrate the information obtained from the debugger into the overall RE process. He concludes with a discussion of how to automate debugging tasks with scripts and plug-ins and discusses some of the real-world problems that people might encounter, such as dealing with UPX packing that has been modified. This chapter also goes into remote debugging, where you can be running a binary on one machine and having it come back to a GUI on another. Knowing this information is especially useful if you are doing analysis across multiple platforms. The Windows GUI is the only non-console GUI in the IDA Pro supported platforms.
Chris Eagle's The IDA Pro Book provides a significantly better understanding not of just IDA Pro itself, but of the entire RE process. There are little gems littered throughout the book that bring in real-life experience and knowledge that you don't always get from other books instructing you in the use of an application. Although it is impossible to absorb everything in this book due to its size, it helped greatly in overcoming some of the initial hurdles of understanding a highly technical topic. As I continue down my reverse engineering path, I'm confident that I will use this book repeatedly as a reference.
If you are interested in getting deep into the assembly and figuring out what applications are doing when you don't have the source, then I would highly recommend this book to get you started with IDA Pro; it won't turn you into a reverse engineering expert, but it certainly will provide you with a major tool that will help you along the way.
You can purchase The IDA Pro Book from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The IDA Pro Book is broken up into a number of different "Parts" each having several chapters and its own goal. Even if the content appears to be beyond your level of knowledge in a certain area, I highly recommend that you keep reading. It may also be handy to point out the fact that the book is 640 pages. So this lends itself to being more of a reference guide than a book read straight through from cover to cover.
I should also mention at this point that the book is about the 5.X tree of IDA Pro, and not the freeware version. There is a demo that you can download off of the IDA Pro Website if you aren't able to purchase the full version right away. In addition, there is a reference at the back discussing how the freeware version differs from the commercial version, so as long as you are ok with those restrictions while you are learning, this book still should be very handy.
One of the most important sections of Chris' book is found in "Introduction to IDA." The author discusses disassembly and the challenges that go with it, the tools involved with reverse engineering and disassembly, and a general breakdown of how these tools approach the binaries that they are analyzing. He also references other tools that are handy alongside IDA Pro, and outlines how they fit into the reverse engineering process. Finally information about IDA Pro licensing and installation is discussed, and the base information that you will need for the rest of your IDA Pro adventure is laid out.
Once the basics of RE have been covered, the author addresses the fundamentals of using IDA Pro. Unlike some other books, this book does a great job of letting you know where you should be looking when it lays out a block of assembly code. The references are well laid out as well. "Part II: Basic IDA Usage" progresses logically and eases you into the interface. It does a great job helping you figure out what all the new windows are doing, and how to get to the information that IDA Pro is providing. The content moves from basic skills such as finding the disassembly into manipulating the disassembly to be more meaningful then to optimizing the disassembly process. It shows you how to navigate the code, and how to incorporate other knowledge that you have about the binary you are disassembling, such as what headers or what libraries might have been used in order to obtain the most useful disassembly possible and facilitate the disassembly of the binary.
"Part III: Advanced IDA Usage" gets deeper into using IDA Pro, including utilizing the Fast Library Identification and Recognition Technology (FLIRT) signatures and custom files in order to suck the most information possible out of a binary before analysis. You also get a glimpse into how to modify the pieces of the application which can be modified only through config files. It concludes by explaining the patch capabilities of IDA Pro and discussing what the limitations and expectations should be. This Part provides insight into creating your own signatures for custom libraries that might not be available in IDA Pro, so, as you start working on real life applications, you can tailor IDA Pro to be able to recognize libraries that you frequently encounter.
After the basics of using the application have been covered, the author explains how to extend the capabilities of IDA Pro in Parts III and IV. He discusses in depth the scripting engine and how to build plug-ins and modules. Throughout this Part numerous examples are given of how the scripting and plug-ins fit into the application. Short detailed examples are used to illustrate how to accomplish some tasks that would be useful for a reverse engineer including listing out function information. The beginning of the chapter was great. As a beginning Reverse Engineer, I was able to clearly see how this information would apply. For the stuff that was beyond my current knowledge level, it was easy to see that as my knowledge progresses in the future, I would be back to re-visit this information.
Throughout the entire fifth Part are goodies focusing on the real-world applications of IDA Pro. It goes into the different types of binaries that you might encounter while doing reverse engineering. This chapter also goes into two large areas where IDA Pro is used such as obfuscated code analysis and vulnerability analysis. After reading this Part, you should have some handy scripts and a series of applications and plug-ins to aid in your RE adventures. The author discusses a number of those plug-ins in-depth including adding in bindings for Python and Ruby. At the end of this chapter, I hadn't learned an incredible amount more about IDA Pro; however I definitely knew more about how to approach the problems I might encounter and how to extend IDA Pro's capabilities in order to tackle real world tasks.
The final Part of the book is on the IDA Debugger. The debugging features of IDA Pro were an afterthought and aren't the primary focus of IDA Pro. Chris Eagle goes into what to expect from the debugger, how it's used, and then finally how to integrate the information obtained from the debugger into the overall RE process. He concludes with a discussion of how to automate debugging tasks with scripts and plug-ins and discusses some of the real-world problems that people might encounter, such as dealing with UPX packing that has been modified. This chapter also goes into remote debugging, where you can be running a binary on one machine and having it come back to a GUI on another. Knowing this information is especially useful if you are doing analysis across multiple platforms. The Windows GUI is the only non-console GUI in the IDA Pro supported platforms.
Chris Eagle's The IDA Pro Book provides a significantly better understanding not of just IDA Pro itself, but of the entire RE process. There are little gems littered throughout the book that bring in real-life experience and knowledge that you don't always get from other books instructing you in the use of an application. Although it is impossible to absorb everything in this book due to its size, it helped greatly in overcoming some of the initial hurdles of understanding a highly technical topic. As I continue down my reverse engineering path, I'm confident that I will use this book repeatedly as a reference.
If you are interested in getting deep into the assembly and figuring out what applications are doing when you don't have the source, then I would highly recommend this book to get you started with IDA Pro; it won't turn you into a reverse engineering expert, but it certainly will provide you with a major tool that will help you along the way.
You can purchase The IDA Pro Book from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
When I think of dirty old men, I think of Ike Thomas and when I think about Ike I get a hard-on that won't quit.
Sixty years ago, I worked in what was once my grandfather's greenhouses. Gramps had died a year earlier and Grandma, now in her seventies had been forced to sell to the competition. I got a job with the new owners and mostly worked the range by myself. That summer, they hired a man to help me get the benches ready for the fall planting.
Ike always looked like he was three days from a shave and his whiskers were dirty white, shaded by the brim of his battered felt fedora.
He did not chew tobacco but the corners of his mouth turned down in a way that, at any moment, I expected a trickle of thin, brown juice to creep down his chin. His bushy, brown eyebrows shaded pale, gray eyes.
The old-timer extended his hand, lifted his leg like a dog about to mark a bush and let go the loudest fart I ever heard. The old fellow then winked at me, "Ike Thomas is the name and playing pecker's my game."
I thought he said, "Checkers." I was nineteen, green as grass. I said, "I was never much good at that game."
"Now me," said Ike, "I just love jumping men ..."
"I'll bet you do."
"... and grabbing on to their peckers," said Ike.
"I thought we were talking about ..."
"You like jumping old men's peckers?"
I shook my head.
"I reckon we'll have to remedy that." Ike lifted his right leg and let go another tremendous fart. "He said, "We best be getting to work."
That summer of 1941 was a more innocent time. I learned most of the sex I knew from those little eight pager cartoon booklets of comic-page characters going at it. Young men read them in the privacy of an outside john, played with themselves, by themselves and didn't brag about it. Sometimes, we got off with a trusted friend and helped each other out.
Under the greenhouse glass, the temperature some times climbed over the hundred degree mark. I had worked stripped to the waist since April and was as brown as a berry. On only his second day on the job and in the middle of August, Ike wore old fashioned overalls. Those and socks in his high-top work shoes was every stitch he wore. When he bent forward, the bib front billowed out and I could see the white curly hairs on his chest and belly.
"Me? I just love to eat pussy!" Ike licked his lips from corner to corner then sticking his tongue out far enough that the tip could touch the end of his nose. He said, A man's not a man till he knows first hand, the flavor of a lady's pussy."
"People do that?"
He winked. "Of course the taste of a hard cock ain't to be sneezed at neither. Now you answer me, yes or no. Does a man's cock taste salty or not?"
"I never ..."
"Well, old Ike's willing to let you find out."
"No way."
"Just teasing," said Ike. "But don't give me no sass or I'll show you my ass." He winked. "Might show it to you anyway, if you was to ask."
"Why would I do that?"
"Curiosity, maybe. I'm guessing you never had a good piece of man ass."
"I'm no queer."
"Now don't be getting judgmental. Enjoying what's at hand ain't being queer. It's taking pleasure where you find it with anybody willing." Ike slipped a hand into the side slit of his overalls and I could tell he was fondling and straightening out his cock. "Now I admit I got me a hole that satisfied a few guys."
I swallowed, hard.
Ike winked. "Care to be asshole buddies?"
---
We worked steadily until noon. Ike drew a worn pocket watch from the bib pocket of his loose overalls and croaked, "Bean time. But first its time to reel out our limber hoses and make with the golden arches before lunch."
I followed Ike to the end of the greenhouse where he stopped at the outside wall of the potting shed. He opened his fly, fished inside, and finger-hooked a soft white penis with a pouting foreskin puckered half an inch past the hidden head.
"Yes sir