Reverse Engineering

Do you want to learn reverse engineering? Here’s how I got started out in the 90s:

Essential reversing tools:

You can get by with only free tools, but for serious reversing you will need to spend around 4000 USD on commercial tools.

Godspeed aspiring reverser!

17 thoughts on “Reverse Engineering”

  1. That’s cool. I’m always messing around with applications binaries in Hex Editors and Disassemblers, but I don’t now enough assembly to know what’s going on in the app. I guess you’re trying to give everyone who keeps asking for a working reverse engineer of iTunes a hint. 😛

  4. What is mising in the free tools that the $4000 tools will afford you? I don’t doubt that what you say is correct, but I would like to know what can be done to aleviate the problem of no really good free tools to get the job done.

  5. I guess we (someone) will have to reverse engineer the $4000 tool :-D… Then the only thing you’ll need in reverse engineering besides the skill and know-how, is TIME (no not the magazine)… which I still don’t have 🙁

  6. I suppose hes talking about more advanced code analyisis tools and commerical products such as IDA pro (command line/ncurses version only, can’t stand gui’s).

  9. My favorite way of reverse engineering things is single-step tracing. Run a program in a debugger, logging every instruction executed (this takes about an hour). Then run the program again with different parameters. sort/uniq the results and compare them. In this way you can see which instructions get executed for various functions and find the parts you’re interested in. This can get tricky when there is UI involved, but for most multimedia programs you can give it a file to play at launch.

  10. How about a list of the actual tools you use? (both free and commercial)

  11. So “Programming the 8086 8088” is your favorite book for X86 assembly? I’m gearing-up to disassemble an old DOS program we use at work, to use its data files outside the EXE and maybe expand it a little, but have never done any X86 programming. I do know some 6502/6510 and 68000 assembly, and have used a bunch of higher-level languages, so I’m not too concerned, but am not sure where to start with X86. So I’d also like to know which tools and books you recommend. 🙂

  12. hi,
    My way of doing programming and debuging is quite oridinary but as i like to do even ordinary things in extraordinary way. I always beliving in doing home work properly, here by home work i mean doing the proper prototyping of the programming before i actually start coding. I always believe in doing paper work and found that it has helped alot to me to do things fast and in better way. In order to find more about my technique and other good things do checkout here Ahmedabad Engineer

    thakns
    Vicky

  15. Modernly, you can find all you need, you just need to know where to look

  16. Hey, it would be great if you could name the tools you use. I am new to cracking, and I would love to know what tools you use. Also, what OS do you run when you are reversing?

  17. I’ve got my old Z80 technical reference that I learned on back in the mid to late 70’s !

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