4 ms·

I had my fair share of reversing more than 10y ago. Such a fun times, learned a lot! > Ideally, readers will have acquired an interactive disassembler such as

I had my fair share of reversing more than 10y ago. Such a fun times, learned a lot! > Ideally, readers will have acquired an interactive disassembler such as Binary Ninja, IDA Pro, or Ghidra I'm guessing OllyDbg is no more an option

jonsen 5y ago
I had my share 40 years ago. No such fancy tools. Wrote out pages of dot matrix print and drawing arrows with a pen. Learned a lot yes!
- cpach 5y ago
  Ah! Dead-listing! I learned the term from this old blog post by Nate Lawson: https://rdist.root.org/2008/07/03/dead-listing-while-on-vacation/ https://rdist.root.org/2008/07/03/dead-listing-while-on-vaca... “What do I do on long plane rides or while listening to the waves lap against the beach? Dead-listing. Dead-listing is analyzing the raw disassembly of some target software and figuring it out using only pen and paper. This is great for vacations because your laptop won’t get sand in it. You usually have a long period of time to muse about the code in question without interruptions, something hard to find at home these days. And I’ve gotten some of my best ideas after setting aside my papers for a while and going for a long swim.”
  - mrspeaker 5y ago
    I learned the term "dead-listing" from Fravia's Pages of Reverse Engineering in the 90s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia]. I felt like such a hardcore hacker removing the nag screen from some bit of shareware! [edit: uh oh, might have fallen down the Fravia rabbit hole again. Here's a mention of dead-listing from '97! https://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/siuL.htm https://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/siuL.htm] [edit 2 - ha ha, the original link you posted the term "dead listing" hyperlinked... to Fravia!]
  - teddyh 5y ago
    Using paper printouts to analyze code is a very old practice. http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20001002 http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20001002
jdsnape 5y ago
OllyDbg is more a debugger than a disassembler (although obviously it will show you disassembly as part of that process). The tools listed are more focused on exploring a binary and have more features to that end. OllyDbg seems to have been replaces by x64dbg for most people I know
- withzombies 5y ago
  Yeah, I specifically mentioned interactive disassemblers here. There are only a few that let you fix up and annotate the disassembly or decompilation and they're leaps and bounds above the ones that don't.
mobilio 5y ago
Once upon a time there was SoftIce and SoftIce for Windows. Oh i miss them!
- tonyhb 5y ago
  This along with ollydbg and w32dasm brings back memories of the old keygen and patch days. SoftIce blew my mind at the time. Man that was fun!
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  I loved SoftIce. It was a royal pain to lock windows up! It was clunky and you had to get a feel for if you were still in your program or you were dragged into the OS for things like Windows actual mouse code/logic. I almost can’t imagine how I did it using another PC for my notes and scratchings. Having to manually type out so many addresses and the code I was inspecting. Still, for some reason I loved SoftIce. I remember it just working.

jonsen 5y ago

I had my share 40 years ago. No such fancy tools. Wrote out pages of dot matrix print and drawing arrows with a pen. Learned a lot yes!

cpach 5y ago
Ah! Dead-listing! I learned the term from this old blog post by Nate Lawson: https://rdist.root.org/2008/07/03/dead-listing-while-on-vacation/ https://rdist.root.org/2008/07/03/dead-listing-while-on-vaca... “What do I do on long plane rides or while listening to the waves lap against the beach? Dead-listing. Dead-listing is analyzing the raw disassembly of some target software and figuring it out using only pen and paper. This is great for vacations because your laptop won’t get sand in it. You usually have a long period of time to muse about the code in question without interruptions, something hard to find at home these days. And I’ve gotten some of my best ideas after setting aside my papers for a while and going for a long swim.”
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  I learned the term "dead-listing" from Fravia's Pages of Reverse Engineering in the 90s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia]. I felt like such a hardcore hacker removing the nag screen from some bit of shareware! [edit: uh oh, might have fallen down the Fravia rabbit hole again. Here's a mention of dead-listing from '97! https://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/siuL.htm https://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/siuL.htm] [edit 2 - ha ha, the original link you posted the term "dead listing" hyperlinked... to Fravia!]
- teddyh 5y ago
  Using paper printouts to analyze code is a very old practice. http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20001002 http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20001002

jdsnape 5y ago

OllyDbg is more a debugger than a disassembler (although obviously it will show you disassembly as part of that process). The tools listed are more focused on exploring a binary and have more features to that end. OllyDbg seems to have been replaces by x64dbg for most people I know

withzombies 5y ago
Yeah, I specifically mentioned interactive disassemblers here. There are only a few that let you fix up and annotate the disassembly or decompilation and they're leaps and bounds above the ones that don't.

mobilio 5y ago

Once upon a time there was SoftIce and SoftIce for Windows. Oh i miss them!

tonyhb 5y ago
This along with ollydbg and w32dasm brings back memories of the old keygen and patch days. SoftIce blew my mind at the time. Man that was fun!
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
I loved SoftIce. It was a royal pain to lock windows up! It was clunky and you had to get a feel for if you were still in your program or you were dragged into the OS for things like Windows actual mouse code/logic. I almost can’t imagine how I did it using another PC for my notes and scratchings. Having to manually type out so many addresses and the code I was inspecting. Still, for some reason I loved SoftIce. I remember it just working.