"This is the densest, most accurate, and, by far, the best IDA Pro book ever released."
—Pierre Vandevenne, Owner and CEO of DataRescue SA

Download Chapter 12: "Library Recognition Using FLIRT Signatures"

For sample code, the binary files used to generate examples, additional examples, and references, visit The IDA Pro Book's Official Website

No source code? No problem. With IDA Pro, you live in a source code–optional world. IDA can automatically analyze the millions of opcodes that make up an executable and present you with a disassembly. But at that point, your work is just beginning. With The IDA Pro Book, you’ll learn how to turn that mountain of mnemonics into something you can actually use.

Hailed by the creator of IDA Pro as the "long-awaited" and "information-packed" guide to IDA, The IDA Pro Book covers everything from the very first steps to advanced automation techniques. While other disassemblers slow your analysis with inflexibility, IDA invites you to customize its output for improved readability and usefulness. You’ll save time and effort as you learn to:

• Identify known library routines, so you can focus your analysis on other areas of the code
• Extend IDA to support new processors and filetypes, making disassembly possible for new or obscure architectures
• Explore popular plug-ins that make writing IDA scripts easier, allow collaborative reverse engineering, and much more
• Utilize IDA’s built-in debugger to tackle obfuscated code that would defeat a stand-alone disassembler

You’ll still need serious assembly skills to tackle the toughest executables, but IDA makes things a lot easier. Whether you’re analyzing the software on a black box or conducting hard-core vulnerability research, a mastery of IDA Pro is crucial to your success. Take your skills to the next level with The IDA Pro Book.

Chris Eagle is a senior lecturer at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is a co-author of Gray Hat Hacking and has spoken at numerous security conferences, including Black Hat, DEFCON, ToorCon, and ShmooCon.