Reverse Engineering with Ghidra

4 Day u_long 32 CPE Hour Training: January 2021

FEB 1-7 [click for important details]

Abstract

This is a majority hands-on course on using Ghidra for reverse-engineering and vulnerability research. Exercises include Windows binaries, Linux binaries, and device firmware. Binaries will also be in a variety of architectures, including ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, x86, and x64. After completing this course, students will have the practical skills to use Ghidra in their day-to-day reversing tasks.

Course Topics

  • Reversing Engineering With Ghidra
    • Ghidra overview
    • Project management
    • Code navigation, manipulation
    • Symbols, labels, bookmarks, searching
    • Disassembler-decompiler interaction
    • Patching
  • Ghidra Expert Tools
    • Decompiler deep dive
    • Datatype management
    • Memory management
    • P-code
    • Program flow
    • Ghidra tools
    • Plugin groups
  • Automation with Ghidra
    • Java/Jython refresher
    • The Ghidra FlatAPI
    • Development with Eclipse and the GhidraDev plugin
    • Analysis in Ghidra headless mode
    • Java-Jython interop
  • Extending Ghidra with ExtensionPoint
    • Loader, Decryptor, FileSystem
    • BuiltInDataType, AbstractAnalyzer

Prerequisites

Students are expected to have experience with static and dynamic analysis, Linux, Windows, command line tools, shell scripting, C, and Python. Students should have the ability to do the following:

  • Declare an array pointer in C
  • Write a python script to XOR an encoded string
  • Perform a function trace using a debugger
  • Identify dead code using a disassembler

System Requirements

Students are expected to bring their own laptops. The laptops are required to run a 30GB virtual machine but will not perform any intensive computation. A recommended hardware configuration would have the following:

  • 50 GB of free hard disk space
  • 16 GB of RAM
  • 4 Processor cores
  • VMWare or Virtual Box to import an ova file
Jeremy Blackthorne

Jeremy Blackthorne

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Jeremy Blackthorne (@0xJeremy) is a co-founder and instructor at the Boston Cybernetics Institute (BCI). Before BCI, he was a researcher in the Cyber System Assessments group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He was the co-creator and instructor for the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute courses: Modern Binary Exploitation and Malware Analysis. Jeremy has published research at various academic and industry conferences. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps with three tours in Iraq and is an alumnus of RPISEC.