The Low-Level Language

The main piece of knowledge required in advance for any reverse engineer is assembly language. Understanding assembly language is like learning the ABCs of reversing. It may look hard at first, but eventually it will become like a muscle memory. Assembly language is the language that is used to communicate with the machine. The source code of a program can be understood by humans but not by the machine. The source code has to be compiled down to its assembly language code form for the machine to understand it. 

But, as humans, what if the source code is not available? Our only way to understand what a program does is to read its assembly codes. In a way, what we are building here is a way to turn an assembly language code back to the source code. That would be why this is called reversing.

We will provide a brief introduction to assembly language...