Self-Learning Reverse Engineering in 2022 

Sometimes I'm streaming on Twitch: www.twitch.tv/liveoverflow

C and especially C++ developers are actually using compiler explorer for _forward_ engineering. I.e. during development they try optimizations there and see what the compiler makes of it, before putting the best version in their code. It's an amazing tool Matt Godbolt brought into the world.

Step 1: pick a target that is not written in C++ with Boost and Qt and built with O3+LTO...otherwise you will spend months reversing the

If one is interested in Reverse engineering themselves, I would highly recommend the book "Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software". It can be found online using a bit of googling. I just finished a course with the name Reverse Engineering and Malware Analysis and there we used this book. This course was obviously heavily focused on how windows malware works and can be detected through different means, but reverse engineering was a big part of it.

I started learning assembly code and disassemblers a couple months ago, with the help of the book "Hacking The Art of Exploitation", really good book but the assembly part was really hard of me. I tried to follow on my computer but had many many issues, got frustrated and just let it go. A couple weeks ago I took it upon myself to read it again, and now I got it a little bit better. For some reason assembly is still challenging for me, but no matter how frustrated you get, take some time, breath, stop for a couple hours maybe days and then try to resume. Would have loved to have this video before. Amazing, thank you so much.

The one thing to remember while learning reverse engineering is that there are a lot of things that you won't get when you try the first time and it's fine. You also have to have a lot of patience since the process of learning reverse engineering can be extremely frustrating and it can make you give up on 5 out of your 10 projects. Always remember that theory will beat practice. Have a goal in mind why you want to learn reverse engineering as that will give you a clear idea of the platform on which you will be working. For example, I want to be a Vulnerbility Researcher and find 0 days on Windows so I would learn all the basics of reverse engineering simple programs on Windows, how to debug them, the tools necessary and I would read through ctf writeups and try stuff on my own. After clearing this up, I would try to increase my level and try malware analysis as it would give me clear understanding of software protections, debugging and understanding a program when almost nothing about the program is known. Then I can proceed to learn about different kinds of vulnerabilities and how they are found and so on.

Thanks for the great shout out! This is a great introduction to Compiler Explorer in general!

Your videos (in particular the binary exploitation playlist) have been a huge help in my cybersecurity career. Thank you very much ❤

Perfect timing. I've been working my way through Practical Malware Analysis, this will be of great help! Thank you.

Thanks for the info about the decompiler collection. What a gift to the community!

Maybe it's worth mentioning that the intermingled output of source code and assembly can also be achieved (and in fact this is for sure what happens in the background on that website) with objdump -S , if the binary was compiled with debugging enabled. So, even if you are somewhere without internet or don't want to share the code you are working on with whoever is running that website, you can still conveniently self-learn reverse engineering in 2022.

Thank you so much. This simple overview was what i needed to look into reverse engineering. Assembly code doesn´t look that scary anymore!

+rep godbolt love, didnt know asm like 2 weeks ago, watched a few vids to briefly get a hang of what it does (alot easier than what i wouldve thought actually), then used godbolt to more understand what my code does at a lower level, its really nice being able to look at asm and be able to tell what it does, especially when u can hover over parts of asm and it highlights the code responsible for it! its been a real help. documentation helps alot to for checking out odd looking functions that ive never really seen before :D 10/10

I love you! Thank you so much, this helps a lot in learning how to get sharper and started! :)

This video is actually really, really good. Thank you!

Started with your binary exploitation playlist and now working in cyber security. Thank you LiveOverflow!

I am currently following along the binary exploitation series and these tools will really help me out, thanks for the video.

Every hacking inquiry I have leads to a video made by you ❤. Keep up the great work.

Nice video, it helped me a lot.

Thanks Liveoverflow!

Thanks a lot for providing this 💖

IT'S REALLY USEFULL... thankyou Febian...

We practiced reverse engineering by rewriting the simple basic utils like cat and tee from their asm dumps. That and also writing some assembly code is helpful

Reversing is a way of life, and it takes time, but is very rewarding once you get the hang of it. Great video as always, sir.👌

Loved background and editing

OMG! godbolt and dogbolt are so beautiful and helpful! 🤯

Nice video I was searching for that

Very nice! Thank you ❤️

Good content. Reverse engineering is how I got started; after taking classes on a language or doing YT tuorials of a certain framework, I'd clone a large GitHub repo to my desktop and toy around with it. See what I could add, see what made it break, read the errors after each save. That method was just as valuable, if not more so, than the classes themselves.

I swear I asked myself this question today Morning & here you are with this video

Thanks for the video it was exciting.

Love your videos watching stream

Literally could not have come at a better time. I've been itching to dive into contributing to Metaforce (reverse engineering of Metroid Prime) and have been scratching my head not knowing how to get started

Great video man. Love the way u pronounce array.

Thanks, really helped

Exactly the video I needed

wow, thank you, it's amazing

Subbed, this was very useful. :)

This is what i need for past couple of weeks 😂❤️

15secs in and I'm already in agreement with your view of an abstract concept.

Weird. Just what I was looking for and you posted it 🤔

this was interesting, didn't thought I would watch the whole thing through

Great resource

Much love from the H1Emu team. (Reverse engineering H1Z1)

thank you so muuch

stumbled on this vid expecting wires n bits n even tho i hate assembly this is so cool

Compiler explorer is actually a really good tool. like if you get cursor to stuff you dont know what it means it will show description of what it is like cmp, rbp and so on. thanks btw didnt knew about this tol.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks!

Thanks mahn

Excellent

Your videos are just amazing. It encourages me to learn more and more. And you look a little like Christian Slater from Mr. Robot 😅

i love your videos specially the binary exploitation serie so can you do some videos about int overflow and int overlow to RCE

Thank you for your efforts. Your channel is one of the best on RU-vid.

Thanks alot

amazing 👀

Awesome man That's what heroes do

I don’t even know how to get started

Very nice 👍 thanks ^_^

Cool

Useful

Crazy channel I came across

OllyDbg and IDA is waving

Godbolt is great for just learning programing in general

1st view 🤞Was waiting for this a long time…

the title so dope

Wow I did not know about dogbolt

I was wondering how software cracking works. Could you do a video on the basic idea?

Good

purchases I made was soft soft. I knew it was my passion but I was just stuck because of trauma I couldn't deal with. Now that I'm at a

now my mind is blow up

Hey! I know you're generally focusing on Reverse Engineering programming code, but I was wondering if you have any experience and or helpful tools on learning how to reverse engineer a file format? I've been working on somehting in my past-time but my best approach was just trying to write parsers for the files in question in Haskell (using Megaparsec), which doesn't lead to a quick analysis cycle having to rebuild the program, running it and either handling a huge print output or navigating bit by bit into the data structures to figure out what came out.

Must say, the cover of your computer would make a great album cover.

I gotta throw my University-Assighment reference Implementation in there, to compare it to my solution, to prove mine is better xD

My man looking more and more like Mr. Robot

I know this is not a very informative comment but... this video is really good and unlike my comment, very informative.

Can you please answer, how to get right tools for reversing. Because, i am newbie in this stuff. I found so many variants of gdb, i found radare2, that is a powerful framework but not without cons, i found ghidra and ida, and both of this gui tools great, and many more tools, including time travel deugging. It's blowing my mind, i can't choose between all of this, and have already spent so many time on googling all this programs. My goals is reverse engineering and binary exploitation, which stack of programs to choose ? Or how do i do it ? Help please..

Great tech explain.

minor thing but there are some strikethroughs in the description

To be honest i am learning reverse engineering currently (self) and worried that i cannot become one. But this single video give me a boost . Lets see what will happen in future

I want to add that Chat GPT can also be an extremely useful resource for learning reverse engineering.

Nice fast video my friend hhhh

one of your chapters has a error it says "Enable gdb -O3 Compiler Optimization" i think you meant gcc

Amazing video liveoverflow!! But What if you are a very nooby and you don't even know anything about how computer hardware works like how cpu functions etc... I heard you mentioning some very intersting stuff like stack,heap etc... But really felt lost hearing them Can you maybe drop us a video for those how wanna get into the field but are struggling with such stuff and don't know what to learn in the beginning?

Godbolt is cool unless you want to reverse Swift code into ARM64, then you're hooped. Got to do it using the Swift compiler

learning yourself is one of the best tools in the world of hacking

Ahhh memories... I used to just read the numbers, and I did know what was happening... No translation necessary.

Can I reverse engineer SASL DRM with this tutorial? I want to crack some add ons that has DRM built inside the content instead of outside of it..

I’m moving to Sweden

Why not use Ghidra? It's free and it does this as well, plus it's a much more powerful tool for when you get more advanced.

I might be nitpicking, but at 2:04 you said a (local) variable, isn't it technically a const(ant) here? It's not a variable type where it can be changed by the program unless it's self modifying code ofcourse. Just learning the basics of C and was wondering if I got it right, so it threw me a bit off :D

Game hacking is a pretty good way to learn reversing skills. It has well defined goals as well, like esp, aimbot, bhop, etc, which can be used to measure success.

Wait, so now we can use the HexRays decomplier without IDA pro?

👍👍👍👍👍

reverse engineering looks kinda fun :)

Push!

I dont understand the functions calls on x86. In your printf it gets assembled to call printf but in mine it gets assembled to call puts. I use the same gcc version to compile so how can that happen?

Hi wäre cool wenn du paar tutorials auf deutsch machen könntest :)

Would still recommend Cheat Engine and, since it exists nowadays, Ghidra.

Expect to see Denuvo games as playground..