Reverse Engineering Fundamentals: A Beginner’s Guide to x86-64 Assembly, the Stack and ELF

From zero to ready to get into reverse engineering with the fundamentals and knowledge that lets you analyze real binaries.

Reverse Engineering Fundamentals is a 40-page PDF primer for cybersecurity students, enthusiasts, and practitionners. It starts at how data is stored and ends at recognizing real control flow in compiled code. Every chapter closes with a review quiz.

What’s inside

• Reverse engineering basics: the compilation pipeline, static vs. dynamic analysis, a typical analysis workflow
• Data representation: hex, two’s complement and endianness
• The CPU: registers, flags and the execution cycle
• The ELF file format: sections vs. segments, the PLT and GOT, lazy binding
• Process memory layout: stack, heap, shared libraries, W^X and ASLR
• The stack and calling conventions: frames, call/ret, 32-bit vs. 64-bit
• x86-64 instruction reference: data movement, arithmetic, comparisons and jumps
• C to assembly: spotting if/else, loops and switch statements
• Tools and protections: Ghidra, GDB, stack canaries, NX, PIE and RELRO

Also included

• 16 diagrams: stack frames, PLT/GOT, memory map, control-flow graphs
• 9 review quizzes with 57 questions, plus a full answer key that explains every answer