Reverse Engineering: Smashing the Signature

Many antivirus and antispyware solutions identify malicious programs by looking for known unique signatures contained inside them. Those signatures are stored inside a database which is constantly updated. This tutorial guides you through a number of steps to encrypt the executable file code section in order to render antivirus signature checking techniques ineffective against identifying the malicious code.

It is intended to be used only for educational purposes. It shows a basic approach on evading antivirus signature checking, although, antivirus solutions may as well check other sections of a PE file like the data sections therefore you will need to widen the targeted sections in order to avoid detection.

Download the paper in PDF format here.