Introduction

The previous chapter discussed the flaws in the applications; they can be exploited and discovered without the need to know exactly how they have been developed. Though there were detailed explanations on some common source code that caused this specific issue, we didn't need to read the source code to know that a SQL injection was possible. Largely, our first step in the direction of a successful exploit was to analyze the behavior of an application from a context that is ignorant of the actual details surrounding its behavior. The reverse engineering discussed in this chapter aims to uncover every single detail of an application's inner workings in order to exploit it.

Reverse engineering, when applied to computer software, is the process of learning how something works and developing ways to make use of, or abuse, this information. For example, reading the source code of a kernel driver may lead to finding a potential memory-corruption flaw, such as improper bounds checking...