Hex-Rays Blog

So far this is the absolute record for the binary size of one division/remainder/multiplication operation:

Suppose our goal is to dissect a new program. The ultimate method of analysis is single stepping the program of interest. Each executed instruction must be single stepped at least once so we won’t miss anything important.

How do you spell “I love you” in Greek?…

Even unobfuscated code is difficult to understand. Look at this function. Can you tell its purpose?

Today I’ll present you a pretty small yet useful plugin.

I updated my EFD utility to handle the packed XCP.DAT file. To extract files from the archive, use: efd -x xcp.dat in a clean directory. It will create files like xcp1.dat, xcp2.dat, etc. Unfortunately the file names are not present in the archive, that’s why the names are so meaningless. Here is the utility: efd.zip

The last week several LGPL violations were found in Sony’s DRM implementation. Here is a proof of one violation. Here is a dedicated page with many other findings. By the way the license breach could be found using the simplest tools on the earth: any hex editor or the strings tool from unix would […]

The last described method does not work if the application uses an “unsupported” antidebugging trick. For example, if the application directly checks the PEB field instead of calling the IsDebuggerPresent function, the method will fail. Or the application could use something else, something from the future…

The last time I showed you a simple trick with conditional breakpoints. Today I will present you a plugin which automates these breakpoints – to the extent that a protected malware like the Zotob worm can be unpacked.

Quite often IDA users ask for a plugin or feature to hide the debugger from the application. In fact there are many anti-debugging tricks and each of them requires an appropriate reaction from the debugger, let’s start with something simple: we will make the IsDebuggerPresent function call always return zero.