Beat your mom at solitaire — A review of reverse engineering techniques and countermeasures

As computer software systems grow ever more sophisticated, so do the mechanisms used in compromising them. Some of the most advanced cyber attacks in recent years would have required considerable preparation and research on the specific software applications and the hardware they targeted. In this paper we focus on native applications and evaluate different reverse engineering techniques with a focus on memory manipulation, used to compromise their security. Additionally we discuss different protection mechanism and their practicalities. The techniques discussed are executed against a well known application (i.e. the Microsoft Windows Solitaire game) and the results are presented.