Striking Back GDB and IDA debuggers through malformed ELF executables
Day by day the endless fight between the bad guys and good guys mostly depends on how fast a countermeasure or anti-reversing protection can be broken. These anti-reversing mechanisms can be used by attackers in a number of ways: to create malware, to be used in precompiled zero-day exploits in the black market, to hinder forensic analysis, and so on. But they can also be used by software companies or developers that want to protect the internal logic of their software products (copyright). The other day I was thinking: why…
Common Coding Mistakes – Wide Character Arrays
This post contains a few of my thoughts on common coding mistakes we see during code reviews when developers deal with wide character arrays. Manipulating wide character strings is reasonably easy to get right, but there are plenty of “gotchas” still popping up. Coders should make sure they take care because a few things can slip your mind when dealing with these strings and result in mistakes. A little bit of background: The term wide character generally refers to character data types with a width larger than a…