This book opens the door to the wonderful world of security mechanisms, showing you how protection is created, and then bypassed. It is addressed to anyone who likes captivating puzzles, and to anyone who spends their spare (or office) time rummaging in the depths of programs and operating systems. Lastly, it is for anyone who is engaged constantly or incidentally in writing protections, and who wants to know how to counteract ubiquitous hackers competently and reliably.
This book is devoted to hacking basics — to the skills needed for working with a debugger and a disassembler. The methods of identifying and reconstructing the key structures of the source language — functions (including virtual ones), local and global variables, branches, cycles, objects and their hierarchies, mathematical operators, etc. — are described in detail.