Fast and furious reverse engineering

Tomislav Pericin is one of the founders of ReversingLabs and the company’s Chief Software Architect. In this video, recorded at Hack in The Box Amsterdam 2012, he talks about TitanEngine, a Swiss army knife for reverse engineers that can be automated.

TitanEngine was designed in such fashion that writing unpackers would mimic analyst’s manual unpacking process. Basic set of libraries, which will later become the framework, had the functionality of the four most common tools used in the unpacking process: debugger, dumper, importer and realigner.

With the guided execution and a set of callbacks these separate modules complement themselves in a manner compatible with the way any reverse engineer would use his tools of choice to unpack the file. This creates an execution timeline which parries the protection execution and gathers information from it while guided to the point from where the protection passes control to the original software code.

When that point is reached file gets dumped to disk and fixed so it resembles the original to as great of a degree as possible. In this fashion problems of making static unpackers have been solved. Yet static unpacking is still important due to the fact that it will always be the most secure, and in some cases, fastest available method.

For more technical information read the TitanEngine whitepaper and download TitanEngine here.