I've been picking up the basics in the past few months - I started out with playing around with some open source tools (radare2/Cutter), and then watching Josh

I've been picking up the basics in the past few months - I started out with playing around with some open source tools (radare2/Cutter), and then watching Josh Stroschein's introductory course on PluralSight [1]. The course is more Windows oriented but that's alright for the basics. Then, I asked my friend to make me a really basic CrackMe challenge [2]. Solving this was where most of the real learning took place. The tool I have been learning is Cutter [3], which is the official GUI for radare2. It's a feature-rich and open-source tool that allows you to reverse engineer without the licensing/price restrictions of the more well-known paid/closed-source tools. To help concrete this new knowledge, I'm currently working on a 3-part introduction to reverse engineering with Cutter series, part 1 of which is out so far [4]. Something that I've found very useful for learning is to analyse your own binary rather than someone else's. Just write basic C++ programs ("What's your name?", calculator, etc - almost as if you're learning programming from scratch again), compile and then reverse engineer them. Having full knowledge of what the binary does and how it works allows you to focus on understanding the technical details (registers, stack, etc) rather than jumping straight in at the deep end with a mystery binary. Once you've got your head around how a basic binary works, the knowledge is very transferable to binaries where you don't have the source code. [1] https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/reverse-engineering-getting-started https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/reverse-engineering-gett... [2] https://github.com/jamieweb/crackme-challenge https://github.com/jamieweb/crackme-challenge Looking at source.cpp may reveal the solution, so be careful! Get a trusted friend to audit the code first if you are concerned about its legitimacy. [3] https://github.com/radareorg/cutter https://github.com/radareorg/cutter [4] https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/radare2-cutter-part-1-key-terminology-and-overview/ https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/radare2-cutter-part-1-key-term...