Reverse-Engineering a Linux Process with strace

The pill you took is part of a trace program. It's designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signals so we can pinpoint your location. And just like that, we can trace signals as they bounce around the Matrix, whether it's the Matrix that simulates Earth in 1999 or the Matrix that generates pretty pictures on …

Uses for Reverse Engineering: Debugging C Code with a Disassembler

One thing I like about C programming for the DOS prompt is that when there's a run time error, a whole collection of debugging information gets dumped to the console. This can be very useful in diagnosing errors, as opposed to the Unix command line, where all you get is a not-so-descriptive message like "Segmentation …

Extracting Text Files from an Archive – With a Hex Editor

I started taking a cyber-security course on Coursera, and one of the projects assigned involves working on a virtual machine, which is to be imported from a .ova archive file downloaded from the course website. Since I have plans to distribute my own homebrewed VMs as .ova files in the future, I wanted to figure …

More Assembly Code Hacking: Deciphering the Program Setup

The "Hello World" program I started disassembling in the last article has a fuck-ton of subroutines, surprising considering that the source code only had one. I am now making an effort to decipher and document all of them and figure out the exact course of system calls made in the execution of a printf() statement. …

Reverse-Engineering a Windows PE Binary

I'm excited, guys! I just made my first real foray into the guts of an executable file à la reverse-engineering with the Interactive Disassembler (IDA) from Hex-Rays. I'm using the freeware version of IDA, which means I don't get any tech support, so I've had to mostly figure out how to do everything myself (although …

Hacking Image Files – With a Hex Editor

So recently I've been doing some SEO research for my site. This research basically consists of searching for my own pages on Google to see what's been indexed and how the pages rank. One problem that I want to solve is Google's penalizing of duplicate or old content. In the case of images, if I …