Reverse engineering methods and computer applications analysis

Reverse engineering relies on hardware and software analysis for commercial or military advantage. The reverse engineering process is about creating a copy in itself or modifying the work in some way, as well as an analysis to extract design features from products that have little or no additional knowledge of the procedures involved in their original production. Reverse engineering of softwares is the process of taking a system or parts of a system and analyzing their functionality and design. Reverse engineering is resorted to as a way to analyze and reconstruct parts of a system at a higher level of abstraction. However, reverse engineering is used for more than that. Assuming that you have emerged a new kind of malware, reverse engineering techniques and skills are needed to analyze the content of malware, understand how it works, and at the same time protect intellectual property against malicious individuals, so that countermeasures against new threats, the source code of which are unknown, can be taken. In addition, knowing the reverse engineering methods and approaches is very important to come up with more effective methods against software piracy. The aim of the thesis is to give information about reverse engineering methods and how to overcome these methods. The important issues for reverse engineering such as x86 platform and assembly language, portable executable file format, Windows application programming interface, anti-debugging and bypassing these methods, packers and unpacking techniques are mentioned and shown in practice in the studies.