Reversing 101 - introduction
December begins today - and with December there some news come by!
What’s this now?
I’ve been doing pentesting since 1999. That’s more than a quarter of a century now — impressive, even to me. Over these long, treacherous years in the field, I’ve seen this profession evolve from multiple angles. One of the persistent leitmotifs of this evolution has been — and still is — the deliberate effort to keep advanced knowledge away from the masses. Sure, it’s easy to find people who can detect XSS; things look very different when you ask them to actually write an exploit. There’s a clear will to keep potentially dangerous skills out of reach of the average newcomer. Maybe that’s justified.
With reverse engineering things are even worse. Beyond the desire to keep dangerous techniques under wraps, there’s also the matter of intellectual property protection. Long story short: real knowledge about reversing techniques, frameworks, and tooling is scarce by design.
And then we get to the foundation of all software reverse engineering: assembly language. It’s not easy — and in the minds of Python-lobotomised fanboys, it’s an almost impossible mountain to climb.
So I’ve decided to share some of my experience here. But before anything else, we need to understand some assembly.
This is not negotiable.
How will this work?
I plan to post one or two easy lessons a week. Each lesson will contain the theory you will need and some practical exercises. Especially when learning Assembly - and we will learn assembly! - pure theory is sterile, and only hands on experiences are not any better.
I will try to emulate online my live teaching style. It’s not going to be easy for me, because in live lessons there is an element of feedback that’s extremely beneficial for the lecturer, and this reverberates also onto the class. This will be lost, indeed - but I promise that I will answer all emails/discord (uh, this reminds me that I’d better open my channel) within one day. Cross my heart!
I will suggest you further readings. It’s up to you to follow the suggestion or not - either way, believe me: don’t pirate books. It’s an offence to the knowledge. Plus it’s utterly stupid: if you steal books, then writers cannot make a living out of it and think twice before publishing new stuff.
Is this free? Yes, it is. But if you want to patron-ise me or buy me a ko-fy, you’re most welcome.
Want the deep dive?
If you’re a security researcher, incident responder, or part of a defensive team and you need the full technical details (labs, YARA sketches, telemetry tricks), email me at info@bytearchitect.io or DM me on X (@reveng3_org). I review legit requests personally and will share private analysis and artefacts to verified contacts only.
Prefer privacy-first contact? Tell me in the first message and I’ll share a PGP key.
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Gabriel(e) Biondo
ByteArchitect · RevEng3 · Rusted Pieces · Sabbath Stones