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Reverse Engineering of an Obfuscated Binary

Version 2 2023-09-25, 02:09
Version 1 2021-12-09, 03:27
thesis
posted on 2023-09-25, 02:09 authored by Yang, Kaishuo

Reverse engineering is an important process employed by both attackers seeking to gain entry to a system as well as the security engineers that protect it. While there are numerous tools developed for this purpose, they often can be tedious to use and rely on prior obtained domain knowledge. After examining a number of contemporary tools, we design and implement a de-noising tool that reduces the human effort needed to perform reverse engineering. The tool takes snapshots of a target program's memory as the user consistently interacts with it. By comparing changes across multiple sets of snapshots, consistent changes in memory that could be attributed to the user action are identified. We go on to demonstrate its use on three Windows applications: Minesweeper, Solitaire and Notepad++. Through assistance from the de-noising tool, we were able to discover information such as the location of mines and values of cards in these two games before they are revealed, and the data structure used for input to Notepad++.

History

Copyright Date

2020-01-01

Date of Award

2020-01-01

Publisher

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Rights License

CC BY-SA 4.0

Degree Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Grantor

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Degree Level

Masters

Degree Name

Master of Science

ANZSRC Type Of Activity code

1 PURE BASIC RESEARCH

Victoria University of Wellington Item Type

Awarded Research Masters Thesis

Language

en_NZ

Victoria University of Wellington School

School of Engineering and Computer Science

Advisors

Pearce, David; Welch, Ian