Assembly

This is a sequel to my (rather long) introduction to reverse engineering. It is something of a “whirlwind tour” of some useful methods that weren’t shown in that tutorial, and provides a number of exercises to hone your skills. The CrackMe Programs You can find the CrackMes discussed here on GitHub. Clone that repository and, without looking at the source code, build each CrackMe with make crackme01, make crackme02, etc.

This document presents an introduction to x86_64 binary reverse engineering, the process of determining the operation of a compiled computer program without access to its source code, through a series of CrackMe programs. There are a lot of excellent tutorials out there, but they mostly focus on the 32-bit x86 platform. Modern computers are, almost without exception, 64-bit capable, so this tutorial introduces 64-bit concepts immediately. A CrackMe is an executable file which takes (typically) a single argument, does some check on it, and returns a message informing the user if it’s correct or not.