The Why of Disassembly
The purpose of disassembly tools is often to facilitate understanding of programs when source code is unavailable. Common situations in which disassembly is used include these:
Analysis of malware
Analysis of closed-source software for vulnerabilities
Analysis of closed-source software for interoperability
Analysis of compiler-generated code to validate compiler performance/correctness
Display of program instructions while debugging
The subsequent sections will explain each situation in more detail.
Malware Analysis
Unless you are dealing with a script-based worm, malware authors seldom do you the favor of providing the source code to their creations. Lacking source code, you are faced with a very limited set of options for discovering ...
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