Preface

Software engineering is the act of creating an invention that exists, lives, and breathes on a microprocessor. We call it a program. Reverse engineering is the act of discovering how exactly that program lives and breathes, and furthermore it is how we can understand, dissect, or modify the behavior of that program using a combination of disassemblers and reversing tools and relying on our hacker instincts to master the target program which we are reverse engineering. We must understand the intricacies of binary formats, memory layout, and the instruction set of the given processor. We therefore become masters of the very life given to a program on a microprocessor. A reverse engineer is skilled in the art of binary mastery. This book is going to give you the proper lessons, insight, and tasks required to become a Linux binary hacker. When someone can call themselves a reverse engineer, they elevate themselves beyond the level of just engineering. A true hacker can not only write code but also dissect code, disassembling the binaries and memory segments in pursuit of modifying the inner workings of a software program; now that is power…

On both a professional and a hobbyist level, I use my reverse engineering skills in the computer security field, whether it is vulnerability analysis, malware analysis, antivirus software, rootkit detection, or virus design. Much of this book will be focused towards computer security. We will analyze memory dumps, reconstruct process images, and explore some of the more esoteric regions of binary analysis, including Linux virus infection and binary forensics. We will dissect malware-infected executables and infect running processes. This book is aimed at explaining the necessary components for reverse engineering in Linux, so we will be going deep into learning ELF (executable and linking format), which is the binary format used in Linux for executables, shared libraries, core dumps, and object files. One of the most significant aspects of this book is the deep insight it gives into the structural complexities of the ELF binary format. The ELF sections, segments, and dynamic linking concepts are vital and exciting chunks of knowledge. We will explore the depths of hacking ELF binaries and see how these skills can be applied to a broad spectrum of work.

The goal of this book is to teach you to be one of the few people with a strong foundation in Linux binary hacking, which will be revealed as a vast topic that opens the door to innovative research and puts you on the cutting edge of low-level hacking in the Linux operating system. You will walk away with valuable knowledge of Linux binary (and memory) patching, virus engineering/analysis, kernel forensics, and the ELF binary format as a whole. You will also gain more insights into program execution and dynamic linking and achieve a higher understanding of binary protection and debugging internals.

I am a computer security researcher, software engineer, and hacker. This book is merely an organized observation and documentation of the research I have done and the foundational knowledge that has manifested as a result.

This knowledge covers a wide span of information that can't be found in any one place on the Internet. This book tries to bring many interrelated topics together into one piece so that it may serve as an introductory manual and reference to the subject of Linux binary and memory hacking. It is by no means a complete reference but does contain a lot of core information to get started with.