Rev 1: Introduction to Reverse Engineering

by Jason An

Reverse engineering is a field of cybersecurity that involves figuring out what a program, often compiled, does, in order to achieve some kind of goal, like bypassing a license check or finding a vulnerability in the software. From professional positions like vulnerability research and malware analysis, to hobbyist activities like game modding or DRM cracking, reverse engineering has a wide variety of interesting applications in cybersecurity. We'll start off by learning basic reverse engineering principles on programs with full to nearly-full source code access, and then move towards learning how to reverse engineer compiled executables later on.

Slides

Challenges

A set of challenges with increasing difficulty are deployed to platform.acmcyber.com to practice the concepts covered in the slides.

Rev Challenges:

• rev/Character Numbers
• rev/my EPIC scrambler
• rev/sandwich
• rev/brick-maze
• rev/schedule-i
• rev/dancing
• rev/salsa69

Resources

The following resources are great tools for some of the reversing challenges:

• Online Java Decompiler: An entirely online tool that can decompile Java jar/class files back to decent-quality source code.
• repl.it: A website that lets you run many different programming languages online, which you can use to play around with programs if you don't want to install them locally.
• CyberChef: An online tool that has a variety of different encoding and encryption schemes, which may be useful.