State-of-the-art binary code analysis tools
This is not the first book about IDA Pro. However, this is the first book I recommend to anyone using IDA Pro because of the following points: Comprehensive: it describes all major IDA features by starting at the beginning and going all the way to the end. Experienced users may be tempted to skip the first few chapters; […]
I’m happy to tell you that Mr. Elias Bachaalany has joined our development team! He is one of keenest and most knowledgeable IDA users. Elias bought his first copy of IDA long ago while he was a student. Immediately after that he contacted us with tons of questions, suggestions, ideas how to improve things, etc. While […]
Good news for real iPhone fans: we ported IDA to iPhone! It can handle any application and provides the same analysis as on other platforms. It is funny to see IDA on a such small device:
Have you ever tried to create a debugger for Mac OS X? It is an adventurous enterprise with lots of unexpected (should I say unforeseeable?) problems. This guy tried and described his adventures in this entertaining post: http://www.matasano.com/log/1100/what-ive-been-doing-on-my-summer-vacation-or-it-has-to-work-otherwise-gdb-wouldnt/ His post reminded me of all problems we faced with the first version of the IDA debugger for iMac. […]
Walking the stack and trying to reconstruct the call stack is a challenge (especially if no or little symbolic information is present) and there are many questions to be answered in order to have a correct call stack: Determining return address Determining the boundary of the caller function Distinguishing between pointers to callbacks and return addresses Determining stack frames … In […]
The last week I attended the Recon conference. It was a very enjoyable event, very nicely organized and handled, in a charming city (Montreal). Since I haven’t seen many conferences yet, I can not really compare it to others but I think it was really great: real RE stuff with no superficial talks. […]
Software programs must be tested before put in use. When there is a single program, things are relatively simple. Running it on multiple platforms is more challenging because it requires testing all of them. But the real nightmare starts when there are multiple programs running on multiple platforms and going to a high abstract level […]
It works! There are lots of limitations but it is alive, handles breakpoints, exceptions, and even some limited tracing is available. It is possible to launch processes and attach to them. Here is just one screenshot: Expect many limitations in the first version (no hardware bpts, limited multithread support, etc). One of the most annoying shortcomings […]
Things are quite easy with the Symbian TRK! Today I decided to write a small program to interact with it and everything worked extremely smoothly. My driver program can download a SIS file to the phone, automatically install and run it. It reacts to debugging events and gracefully closes the connection when the application […]
Yesterday I created my first Symbian program 🙂 Sure enough, it was a “hello world” and to tell the truth I did not write it myself. But it still took me 3 (three) hours to get it running on Nokia E51. The good side is that I learned a lot about possible failures with Symbian […]