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Comprehensive Lecture Notes on Malware Analysis

Apr 19, 2025

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Class Lecture Notes

Introduction

  • Course Licensing:
    • Licensed under Creative Commons.
    • Materials are publicly available.
    • Encouragement to teach this material to others once mastered.
    • Resources available at OpenSecurityTraining.info.

Contributors and Credits

  • Contributions from various individuals recognized.
  • Examples of contributors: Rong and Christina Johnson.

Class Structure

  • Focus Areas:
    • Malware analysis and reverse engineering.
    • Separating regular reverse engineering from malware reverse engineering.
  • Course Goals:
    • Gradual transition in learning complex topics.
    • Covered topics include memory segmentation, paging, interrupts, and practical debugging tools.
  • Future Courses:
    • Courses on advanced topics like malware analysis, vulnerability exploits planned.
    • Courses will have video recordings available next year.

Course Content

  • Key Topics:
    • Segmentation: Understand how x86 architecture uses memory segmentation.
    • Paging: Learn about virtual memory and finer granularity.
    • Interrupts: Understand how interruptions affect systems.
    • Practical Tools: Understand debugging, input/output operations.

Instruction Review

  • Review of x86 Instructions:
    • NOP: No operation, implemented as exchange eax, eax.
    • PUSH/POP: Stack operations manipulating the stack pointers.
    • CALL/RETURN: Functions calling and returning, altering instruction pointers.
    • MOV/LEA: Move and load effective address for memory and register operations.
    • ADD/SUBTRACT: Arithmetic operations.
    • JUMP/JCC: Unconditional and conditional jumps.
    • CMP/TEST: Compare and test flags for conditional operations.
    • Logical Operations: AND, OR, XOR, NOT.
    • Shift Operations: Logical and arithmetic shifts, difference in handling signed numbers.
    • Multiplication/Division: Understanding signed and unsigned operations.
    • REP Instructions: Repeat string operations, storing, and moving data.

Class Logistics

  • Class Schedule:
    • 2-hour session followed by a break, then another 2-hour session.
    • Lunch and post-lunch sessions with breaks.
  • Participation:
    • Encouragement to ask questions immediately to avoid getting lost.

Quiz and Interaction

  • Student Engagement:
    • Review of past instructions with student interactions.
    • Example of quiz questions and answers discussed.

These notes capture the high-level summary and key points from the lecture. They serve as a comprehensive reference for review and understanding of the topics discussed.

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