32-bit Assembly on Linux and the ELF Specification

A conversation with a colleague of mine, and his dislike for learning assembly, helped me to realize that my tastes are a bit weird, and frankly, I'm more than OK with that. As a matter of fact, I have a huge passion for assembly after taking some training myself a number of years ago. I really appreciated how digestible the instructor of that training process made the material because it took away my initial fear and anxiety about learning what seemed like, at the time, a terribly complicated programming language. It's my hope that, after reading through this chapter, you too get an appreciation for the value of knowing assembly, not only for its use in binary analysis, but in information security in general. Since learning about 32-bit and 64-bit assembly on Linux, I've found a new appreciation for those binary...