Masters Thesis Defense “Web-Delivered Assembly Language Interactive Training and its Sequence Identification for Software Reverse Engineering” By Sunethra Thimmapuram

Committee:  Drs. Adam Bryant, Advisor, Mateen Rizki, and Michelle Cheatham

ABSTRACT:

The purpose of this research is to help the beginners of reverse-engineering, the process of extracting knowledge or design information from a product and reproducing it on basis of extracted information. Beginner users often find it difficult to use, as the task may be found daunting at first sight due to a lack of existing learning resources. We need a better way to present information to the novice reverse engineer about how to understand low-level sequences of assembly instructions. This is akin to how the key to learning a foreign language is based upon a fundamental knowledge of the word sequences (grammar).

With this in mind, a web model named ‘WATSRE’ (web-delivered assembly language training for software reverse engineering) is developed to analyze the common patterns of sequences in assembly language. The term assembly language is referred as the low-level programming language for a computer, or microprocessors and other programmable devices. One of the prime reasons to inquire assembly language is that the executables from the debugger are all in binary instruction format. Moreover, common sequences are identified from the executable files of the real world C programs. These sequences identified are translated to the meaningful words, which will then be useful for beginners as it is easy to memorize it. Such features developed in this program will assist a beginner in understanding and comprehending these instructions easily and accurately. In addition to this, we focus on the working of assembly instructions and their effect on memory and registers in this work. Hence, the finding of this research will be useful in helping all the reverse engineers and people related to this field.