reverse-engineering
3 free lessons tagged reverse-engineering across Programming. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Dynamic analysis and debuggers
Reverse engineering by running the binary. Why dynamic analysis sees what static cannot, how debuggers and breakpoints actually work (INT3 vs hardware vs page-fault), tracing (strace, ltrace, dtrace, eBPF), dynamic binary instrumentation with Frida and PIN, the common anti-debug tricks, sandboxing with Unicorn and Qiling, and the static-dynamic loop that does the real work.
Disassembly and decompilation
Reading machine code back into something a human can reason about. Instruction decoding (linear sweep vs recursive descent), x86-64 calling conventions, stack frames, control-flow graph recovery, what decompilers actually do and what they fundamentally cannot recover, and the practical tool landscape (IDA, Ghidra, Binary Ninja, radare2).
Binary formats and what the loader does
The first layer of reverse engineering — the file format on disk and the loader that maps it into memory. ELF, PE, and Mach-O as variants of the same idea; sections vs segments; symbol tables and what stripping actually removes; PLT/GOT/IAT and dynamic linking; packers like UPX; and the triage you do before opening a disassembler.