Reverse Engineering: Tools and Strategies

Summary

Quickly identifying control flow constructs can massively speed up reverse engineering. They provide insights into the logic of an application and make it more readable and comprehensible. However, compiler configuration has a significant impact on the speed of reversing. In larger and more complex programs, automating some reverse engineering is often necessary. Unpacking, deobfuscating, and circumventing anti‐debug checks are common tasks for automation. Some of the most commonly used initial tools for reverse engineers are objdump, strace, ltrace, and strings. Dependency walking is a technique used to quickly understand the imports and exports of an application. Dependency Walker is one example of such a tool. Dependency walking provides a valuable, high‐level view into what actions a program will perform and is often a useful first step in cracking. Applications contain large volumes of code, and most of it is irrelevant or unnecessary to reverse engineer.