Nynaeve

If you’re planning on reverse engineering something (or debugging unfaimilar code), then it’s important to have the right tools for the job. This is a short list of some of the various tools that I find useful for this line of work (some are free, others are not; they are good tools, though, so I would encourage you to support the authors); if I am going to be doing extensive reversing (or debugging) work on a system, I’ll typically install most (or all) of these tools:

• WinDbg (Debugging Tools for Windows); the de-facto debugger for Windows NT-based systems (and it’s freely available). Although there are other good debuggers out there (such as OllyDbg), it’s hard to beat the fact that Microsoft develops the debugger, and the designers have a great deal of information about and experience with the internals of the operating system. WinDbg comes with a plethora of plugin modules (extensions) that automate and improve many common tasks, and it has a well-documented and powerful interface to allow third parties (such as yourself) to program new extension modules for customized tasks. Additionally, WinDbg supports a (relatively crude, but effective nevertheless) scripting language. WinDbg can be used on 32-bit and 64-bit (IA64 and x64) targets in both user mode and kernel mode, and is the only supported facilities for debugging problems at customer sites or debugging certain specialized scenarios (like certain infrastructure processes, or fullscreen processes). The Debugging Tools for Windows distribution also includes ntsd, cdb, and kd, which are different (command-line) front-ends to the same debugger engine used by WinDbg. It also includes various other useful utilities, such as Logger (an API call spy program).
• IDA Pro, or the Interactive Disassembler. IDA is the most full-featured disassembler (by a huge margin) out there that I know of, and it supports a wide variety of target architectures and operating systems to boot (although its support for x86 is probably the most full-featured of all the target architectures that you can use it on). IDA automates many of the aspects of disassembly and reverse engineering that have historically been tedious and error-prone, such as stack variable tracking. The full version of IDA is relatively pricey (on the order of $500..$900 or so, depending on whether you need x64 support), but if you’re serious about reverse engineering, it’s a good investment. For the casual reverse engineer, DataRescue has released a previous version, IDA 4.30, for free. If you are just working with x86 or simply want to get your feet wet with reversing, the free version is a good place to start. Although tools like WinDbg include a built-in disassembler, IDA’s advanced code analysis and interactive aspects (such as allowing the user to describe and annotate types, names, and variables in a structured fashion) make it far superior for non-trivial reverse engineering projects.
• HIEW (Hacker’s vIEW) is a powerful (console-based) hex editor / disassembler / assembler for 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit (x64) targets. It understands the various Windows image formats, but it can also be used on raw binary files as well. In addition to serving all of your hex editor needs, HIEW is just the perfect tool to use when you need to make quick on-disk patches to executables (and the integrated disassembler and assembler makes creating and applying such patches on-the-fly a walk in the park compared to traditional hex editors, which wourld require you to manually build the opcodes yourself, a pain for non-trivial patches). HIEW includes some additional power-features as well, such as a way to create and run simple programs to decrypt sections in a file (very useful if you’re working on something that is self-decrypting, and you know how to decrypt it but don’t have a program to do so already). It also includes a fairly simple plugin extension interface to allow custom actions to be integrated with the HIEW user interface. HIEW isn’t free, although it is fairly reasonably priced (and there is a (limited) demo that you can play around with).
• The Windows Vista SDK is an essential tool for many reverse engineering tasks. It includes extensive documentation (as well as headers) for all public Win32 APIs, and it also includes several useful utilities as well (such as link.exe /dump, otherwise known as dumpbin.exe, which can be used to quickly extract various bits of information from a binary (like a list of imports) without having to load it up into a full-featured disassembler tool). The Vista SDK also includes OleView, which can be useful for inspecting a third-party COM library, as it has integrated support for turning a type library into MSIL (which can be trivially converted to a C header as needed).
• Process Monitor, from SysInternals, is a great utility for quickly inspecting what file and registry operations a program is making. Depending on what you are trying to figure out when analyzing a program, simply looking at its file and registry activity can often save you hours of wading through disassembly or working with a debugger. Process Monitor allows you to perform (potentially filtered) in-depth logging of low-level file and registry activity, including operations that fail and the data returned by successful operations in some circumstances. Process Monitor is freely available from Microsoft’s website.
• Process Explorer, formerly known as HandleEx, is another freely available tool from SysInternals. It allows quick and easy searching of open handles and loaded modules within a process, which is handy for initial information gathering (such as finding which process uses a DLL that you might be interested in). The ability to quickly check active processes for a DLL is also quite handy if you are trying to track down where a shared DLL (like a Windows hook DLL) is getting loaded in as a precursor to in-depth analysis.
• SDbgExt is a WinDbg extension that I’ve developed (shameless plug). It provides a number of features that are useful for analyzing unfamiliar targets, such as the ability to import map files and create symbolic names out of them (particularly useful in conjunction with IDA’s export map file feature, if you want to synchronize your process between IDA and WinDbg), support for identifying writable function pointers within a process address space, and support for locating and displaying x64 exception/unwind handlers. SDbgExt presently only supports the 32-bit version of WinDbg. It is freely available (see the link above), and requires that WinDbg and the VC2005 CRT be installed.

There are other useful utilities out there (this is hardly an all-inclusive list), but these are the ones that I use the most often in a wide variety of situations.

The compiler is often very clever about speeding up some common operations in C (with how they might appear in assembler), in a way that might at first appear a bit non-obvious. With a bit of practice, you can train yourself to quickly identify these optimizations and see what they really do. These kinds of optimizations are very common with constant values.

With many of these little “assembly tricks”, the compiler is not simply taking into account instruction speed, but also instruction size, in order to reduce the total amount of opcode bytes required to do an optimization.

This post series attempts to provide a basic overview (and rationale) of several of the most common compiler optimizations that you might see while analyzing x86 assembly code. Knowing what these “assembly tricks” do is a great benefit if you are debugging or reverse engineering something, as it allows one to quickly recognize certain compiler patterns and gain clues as to what a program is doing.

Without further ado, here’s a brief overview of several of these such optimizations:

1. Clearing a register value by xor reg, reg is a very common sequence in x86 code generated by a compiler. You will almost never see an instruction of the form mov reg, 0. Instead, the compiler will virtually always use the above-mentioned xor construct.

   The reasoning behind this is that the xor reg, reg construct is a very small instruction in terms of opcode bytes (2 bytes), whereas assigning a constant 32-bit value is typically much more expensive in terms of opcode length (say, 5 bytes).

   The gain with this optimization is reduced code size. Reducing code size is always good, and can lead to improved performance in that it improves the cacheability of a particular chunk of code (remember, most processor cache sizes are still very small compared to main system memory or hard drives). Also, if the compiler can shrink down the total image size by even one page (e.g. 4096 bytes) with optimizations like this, that’s one less page fault that needs to be taken when loading the program. This can be noticible even in lengths less than a page, if a function can be kept within one page instead of spilling over to a neighboring page (which might not be used for the current code path), which can eliminate “extraneous” page faults, where most of the data brought in is unnecessary.

   (It’s worth noting that this sort of optimization has come a long way recently, in the form of profile-guided BBT-style optimizations that reorder “hot” code paths to be on the same page in an attempt to make every byte that is in-paged from disk be as relevant as possible to the current execution path.)

2. The constant zero register another very common optimization technique used by the compiler. Since the value zero appears so frequently in many functions (e.g. default parameter values are typically zero, and it is very common to compare values against zero or assign values to zero), the compiler will sometimes dedicate an entire register to contain the value zero throughout most of the function. Here’s an example, taken from nt!MmZeroPageThread:

   xor     esi, esi
   cmp     [ebp+var_14], esi
   [...]
   push    esi             ; WaitBlockArray
   push    esi             ; Timeout
   push    esi             ; Alertable
   push    esi             ; WaitMode
   push    8               ; WaitReason
   xor     ebx, ebx
   inc     ebx
   push    ebx             ; WaitType
   lea     eax, [ebp+Object]
   push    eax             ; Object
   push    2               ; Count
   call    _KeWaitForMultipleObjects@32

   Here, the compiler has dedicated the “esi” register to be the constant zero value for this function. It is used in many cases; in just a small part of nt!MmZeroPageThread, for instance, we can see that it is being used as both an argument to the “cmp” instruction for a test against constant zero, and we can also see it being used to fill many constant zero parameter values for a call to KeWaitForMultipleObjects.

   The gain from using a constant zero register is typically reduced code size. In x86, in many cases, it takes less opcode bytes to assign or compare a value to a register than to an immediate constant operand. The compiler takes advantage of this fact by only “paying the price” for referencing the value zero in an immediate operand for an instruction once, by storing it into a register. Then, the compiler can simply refer to that register for smaller overall code size if references to constant zero are common enough. For example, in the above code fragment, the compiler saves one opcode byte per push esi instruction over doing a push 0 instruction.

3. Fast multiplication or addition with the lea instruction is another fairly common optimization that one is likely to run into frequently. The lea instruction (load effective address) was originally intended for use with pointer math, but it also turns out to be quite useful for doing fast constant math on non-pointer values as well, in part due to the wide range of operations that can be done with this instruction.

   Consider the following code fragment:

   mov     eax, [ebp+some_local]
   movzx   ecx, bx
   lea     eax, [eax+eax*4]
   lea     eax, [ecx+eax*2-30h]
   mov     [ebp+other_local], eax

   This instruction sequence may seem a bit convoluted at first, but it’s not too bad if we break it down into its constituent parts (and then combine it into one operation).

   We have the following operations:

   lea     eax, [eax+eax*4]

   This operation is equivalent to the following in C:

   other_local = some_local;
   other_local *= 5;

   Then, we’ve got the second lea operation:

   lea     eax, [ecx+eax*2-30h]

   In C, this might look like so:

   other_local = other_local * 2 + X - 0x30;

   …(where X corresponds to bx (and then ecx)).

   If we combine the two together, we get the following expression in C:

   other_local = some_local * 10 + X - 0x30;

   Now, the compiler could have used a combination of mul, add, and sub instructions to achieve the same effect. However, this would be more expensive in terms of instruction size, as those instructions are designed to work with values that are not known at runtime. By using the lea instruction, the compiler can take advantage of the fact that the lea instruction can perform multiple operations with one instruction in order to reduce code size.

4. The lea instruction is also useful for scaling array indicies to their native type. Recall that in C, if you subscript an array, the subscript is performed on whole array elements; in the x86 instruction set, however, the processor has no way of magically knowing the size of an array element when the programmer subscripts an array.

   For example, consider the following structure:

   0:000> dt nt!_MMPFN
      +0x000 u1               : __unnamed
      +0x004 PteAddress       : Ptr32 _MMPTE
      +0x008 u2               : __unnamed
      +0x00c u3               : __unnamed
      +0x010 OriginalPte      : _MMPTE
      +0x010 AweReferenceCount : Int4B
      +0x014 u4               : __unnamed ; 4 bytes
   

   In this case, sizeof(nt!_MMPFN) == 24 (0x18). Consider an array of _MMPFN structures like so:

   _MMPFN MmPfnDatabase[ array_size ];

   If the programmer wants to index MmPfnDatabase (i.e. retrieve a pointer to a particular _MMPFN element within the array), then the compiler needs to convert an index into a pointer to an _MMPFN structure contained within the array.

   For example, the programmer might write the following C code:

   _MMPFN* Pfn = &MmPfnDatabase[ PfnIndex ];

   At the x86 instruction set level, though, the compiler needs to convert PfnIndex into a pointer. This requires two operations: First, PfnIndex needs to be scaled to the array size (or multipled by sizeof(_MMPFN). Second, the resultant value needs to be added to the base of MmPfnDatabase to form a complete pointer value to the requested _MMPFN element.

   In order to accomplish this, the compiler might emit the following instruction sequence:

   mov     eax, [ebp+PfnIndex]
   mov     ecx, _MmPfnDatabase
   push    ebx
   mov     ebx, [ebp+arg_4]
   lea     eax, [eax+eax*2]
   push    esi
   lea     esi, [ecx+eax*8]
   

   Here, the lea instruction is used to take the PfnIndex and MmPfnDatabase values and combine them into an _MMPFN pointer (stored in “esi”). If we break down the individual operations performed, what’s going on here isn’t all that difficult to understand:

   1. The initial LEA operation is equivalent to multiplying PfnIndex by 3 (PfnIndex is stored into “eax”).
   2. The final LEA operation multiplies the result of the first LEA operation by 8 (which can be simplified to say that PfnIndex has been multiplied by 24, which is conveniently equal to sizeof(_MMPFN).
   3. Finally (also part of the last LEA operation), “ecx” (which was loaded with the base address of MmPfnDatabase) is added to the intermediate result, which is then placed into “esi”, forming a completed _MMPFN pointer.

   Like with performing constant math for non-array indexing, the advantage of using lea over a series of mul and add operations is primarily code size, as lea allows for several distinct operations (e.g. multiply/add, or multiply/subtract) to be combined into a single compact operation. Most processors also provide very fast implementations of the lea instruction (as compared to the mul instruction for constant multiply operations).

   In order to be able to differentiate between an array indexing operation and plain constant math using lea, I would recommend checking to see whether any of the input values are treated as pointers or if the output value is treated as a pointer. Usually, it’s fairly easy to make this determination, though.

   As an aside, if you are reverse engineering something, constructs like array index operations are very handy as they will definitively tell you the size of the structure comprising an array.

The next post in this series will continue this discussion and examine several more common (and more complicated) optimizations and assembly tricks that the compiler may emit on x86. Stay tuned…