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Reverse Engineering for Beginners [pdf]

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Re: Reverse Engineering for Beginners [pdf]

#11
post #6

For beginners...1054 pages of assembly. Sometimes I think the entire IT sector is on the spectrum.

beginners to reverse engineering, nothing otherwise implied

wouldn't "Introduction to Reverse Engineering" imply you're a beginner at RE if you're reading it?

Re: Reverse Engineering for Beginners [pdf]

#12

This looks like a great resource for beginners, albeit a bit dense and overwhelming. If you're looking for a very gentle introduction the Lena151 video tutorials are great: https://tuts4you.com/e107_plugins/download/download.php?list... They're a bit dated, but all the concepts are still relevant. I wish we had all these great learning resources around when I was starting with W32Dasm + Hiew lol

Lena151's tutorials were how I got into RE back when I was yet to install WinXP SP1.

Re: Reverse Engineering for Beginners [pdf]

#14

This looks like a great resource for beginners, albeit a bit dense and overwhelming. If you're looking for a very gentle introduction the Lena151 video tutorials are great: https://tuts4you.com/e107_plugins/download/download.php?list... They're a bit dated, but all the concepts are still relevant. I wish we had all these great learning resources around when I was starting with W32Dasm + Hiew lol

The Lena151 tutorials will only teach dynamic analysis, not static analysis. What most people do in industry is a combination of static and dynamic analysis. Static analysis being used to figure out the overall structure and function of a binary, and dynamic analysis being used to fill in details that would otherwise be tedious to figure out with a pure static approach.

Re: Reverse Engineering for Beginners [pdf]

#15

Any input from beginners who have dipped their toes into this? Is the content explained fairly intuitively or in a way that is simple to understand? I'm also curious - for those in the know - is the pursuit of knowledge regarding reverse engineering something that has proven valuable in a job or is it primarily an academic pursuit? If it has proven valuable, how so?

The book is good and it explains stuff very well. It can be a bit dense in the beginning, if you're looking for a gentler introduction look at the Lena151 tutorials I linked to elsewhere in this thread.

Ultimately reverse engineering is a hard and dry topic to learn. Different people learn in different ways. Try several different tutorials and learning resources before finding what works for you.

Reverse engineering has been invaluable for my career. It helps you understand the intricacies of modern systems, and makes it so you're never afraid to dive under the hood of something. You approach all software with a can-do attitude, because you know that no matter what, with enough effort you will be able to understand it and make it do what you want.

It has also opened up many interesting career paths for me in game anticheat, software exploitation, and tamper resistance. The jobs pay well and are very interesting :)

Re: Reverse Engineering for Beginners [pdf]

#16
post #6

For beginners...1054 pages of assembly. Sometimes I think the entire IT sector is on the spectrum.

This book is great. I would say that it is for beginners as long as they have some semblance of C understanding and spent a few hours (days?) reading up about assembly and machine code topics. These skills take years to truly master and the book starts from the beginning. I think the difficulty of asm is overrated (its not uncommon for young kids to learn this sort of stuff).

I think one of the greatest initial hurdles of being a good reverser is not being afraid to wade through large amounts of disassembly and being comfortable with not understanding whats going on for long periods of time.

Re: Reverse Engineering for Beginners [pdf]

#19

Any input from beginners who have dipped their toes into this? Is the content explained fairly intuitively or in a way that is simple to understand? I'm also curious - for those in the know - is the pursuit of knowledge regarding reverse engineering something that has proven valuable in a job or is it primarily an academic pursuit? If it has proven valuable, how so?

I'm one "in the know", so I'll answer that part.

Heck yeah it is valuable. My area has numerous employers that are eager to hire people with that skill set. It pays more than the typical software development jobs. Most of the jobs seem to be related to how things get hacked into. One can play defense or offense.

I post about my employer in the "Who is hiring?" sometimes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21422735

Re: Reverse Engineering for Beginners [pdf]

#20
post #3

I more or less compulsively downloaded this, and started skimming it. I'm not an assembly-language programmer, but I thought I at least knew how to read an assembly listing. But right there on page 8, in the MIPS and ARM "functions that return a constant", is an example of "branch delay slots", which (a) I've never heard of, and (b) failure to grok them makes a two line function incomprehensible. Fortunately, I like…

Branch delay slots on MIPS come about because the instruction decoder already has the next instruction ready by the time the conditional runs. The architecture decides to unconditionally run this instruction instead of potentially throwing it away due to the results of the branch.
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