High-Level Reverse Engineering

This paper aims to present a methodical framework for high-level reverse engineering. The methodology is a culmination of existing tools and techniques within the IT security research community, which presents ways to identify process operation at a higher-level of abstraction than traditional binary reversing. Here, we focus our attention on application DLLs and the functions that they implement and export, which includes process interactions with other applications and various operating system function calls.

We use existing tools and techniques to derive ways of quickly identifying how applications are constructed, the functions that they use and how they use them. Following this high-level reverse engineering, the researcher is then free to take further steps at reversing specific functions with the more traditional lower-level binary analysis.

Download the paper in PDF format here.