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Go Back to Reverse Engineering Malware 101
Section 1.2: Fundamentals
Anatomy of a Windows PE C program
Typical windows programs are in the Portable Executable (PE) Format. It’s portable because it contains information, resources, and references to dynamic-linked libraries (DLL) that allows windows to load and execute the machine code.
Windows Architecture
In this workshop we will be focusing on user-mode applications.
User-mode vs. Kernel Mode [1]
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In user-mode, an application starts a user-mode process which comes with its own private virtual address space and handle table
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In kernel mode, applications share virtual address space.
This diagram shows the relationship of application components for user-mode and kernel-mode.
PE Header
The PE header provides the information to operating system on how to map the file into memory. The executable code has designated regions that require a different memory protection (RWX)
- Read
- Write
- Execute
This diagram shows how this header is broken up.
Here is a hexcode dump of a PE header we will be working with.
Memory Layout
This diagram illustrates how the PE is placed into memory.
