Intro to X86 Architecture - [Low Level Programming]

in programming •  7 years ago 

Recently, I've been flooding my mind with knowledge about assembly, low-level programming, as well as types of chip architectures and how they use different types of registers (i.e. 32-bit vs. 64-bit, or even earlier versions).

This helps me understand and grasp concepts and fundamentals of reverse engineering, which are potentially useful when dissecting malware. This is something that, in my opinion, is extremely hard to do, but nevertheless can aid the field of information security, as we're being bombarded with malware in an ever increasing fashion. Hence, security analyst and reverse engineering experts are two types of figures that are and will be extremely sought after.

Below, is one of lessons from a series I've been following. It introduces the student to architectures and goes a little more indepth of x86 chips.



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Cristi Vlad Self-Experimenter and Author

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  ·  7 years ago (edited)

8085, yeah it was my first. Soon graduated to 8-bit AVR from there. I remember my professor shutting me and my friends down for progressing a little too fast. He wasn't convinced and thought we were not fully understanding the architecture and trying to act smart. We convinced him otherwise and he let us be. In fact he himself got us two more 32 bit hardware platforms (approx. thousand euros each) for messing around.
CONFESSION: the truth is that we did not fully understand the architecture. We only just had a bit of working knowledge then ;-)

Wow, that's a great recollection! I wish I'd be learning that kind of stuff back in the days. Are you a software engineer?

Electronics and then Robotics

  ·  7 years ago Reveal Comment

I'm wondering whether this architecture is not outdated today. But the mental gymnastics this triggers could indeed be quite useful.

Not necessarily, however, some of the great books have been written a decade ago...