How to learn Assembly

[nulli]

What is this fowl word i hear? you want to learn assembly because you want to hack? ohh my god! Sorry but thats something i would expect from a skript kiddies mouth.

Programming in assembly is for the people who has a love for processors and their instruction sets. Not because you want todo hacking. Oh well.. if that is all you want todo feel free to go ahead. But the road to assembly is long and hard. Can you stick with it?

Here are some links to settle your curiosity:
http://www.masmforum.com/
http://board.win32asmcommunity.net/
http://board.win32asmcommunity.net/showthread.php?threadid=8984

You wanted to learn assembly.. well above are the best forums.. they however do not like hacking/cracking/blah.. topics. So choose your words carefully.

[JMI]

Actually, learning assembly language is a fairly essential skill because it is what is displayed in the debugger for most programming languages. Yes, I know that there are exceptions, but the majority of what one sees when using the standard debuggers is assembly language.

That said, it is not necessary that one actually learns how to "program" in assembly language, although it is certainly an advantage. However, what one needs to know is at least how to recognize assembly language code and have some basic understanding of what the code is telling you it is doing. You may not recognize that the assembly is setting up some procedure using or not using some API or another, but you better well recognize what the operand instructions are telling you is happening with the code.

By this, I simply mean you need to recognize and understand the use of registers to store information and pointers and many other things of interest to the reverser. If one does not understand what the various instructions actually do to whatever they are manipulating, one has little chance of figuring out what to look for and/or how it might be changed to make the desired result happen. This means it is fairly essential that one have a working understanding of the mnemonics displayed in SICE and/or OllyDbg and/or WinDBG., or whatever.

Without the understanding, one can not expect to even recognize what the debugger displays, let alone where, or how to change it, beyond following, by rote, someone elses tutorial, step by step. That is not actually learning anything, other than how to follow a receipt, such as from a cook book. One is not really learning how to cook, one is only learning how to follow what the cook said to do to make that particular thing the exact same way he/she said to make it.

There are many sources available on the net to acquire such basic knowledge "of" assembly language, aside from the acquiring of the knowledge of how to actually "program" in that language.

Works such as:

Iczelion's Win32 Assembly Tutorial Series; The Art of Assembly Language Programming; Assembly for Crackers; Assembly Language Reference by Dr. ME!; The cRACKER's n0TES

are but a few of those readly available sources for acquiring some basic knowledge and but a small part of the reference files I maintain on my computer archive. There are many more, as any simple search using "assembly language + tutorial" will find.

There is really very little substitue in Reverse Engineering for actually starting "at the beginning" and learning the basics of what the code is telling you when you look at it in the debugger. That is the primary tool and the primary method used to do this work and failure to spend the time necessary to acquire a basic understanding of these issues is a substantial impediment to further skill development.

Regards,

Originally Posted by nulli

What is this fowl word i hear? you want to learn assembly because you want to hack? ohh my god! Sorry but thats something i would expect from a skript kiddies mouth.

Programming in assembly is for the people who has a love for processors and their instruction sets. Not because you want todo hacking. Oh well.. if that is all you want todo feel free to go ahead. But the road to assembly is long and hard. Can you stick with it?

This board is entirely about hacking in the sense of your second paragraph. Hacking is to know the machine and its software to such an extent that you can give the machine capabilities beyond the mundane, or that your skills are such that you can resolve problems that others cannot completely understand.

BTW, thanks for the links. Incidentally, I started on the software side of things by programming self test diagnotics into ROM for circuit cards. All this was done in assembly of course, just not Intel assembly. And of course there was no such thing as Windows. So while the learning curve is long (including the Win32 API) I do at least have the basics.

dcow

[nulli]

Originally Posted by dcow

This board is entirely about hacking in the sense of your second paragraph. Hacking is to know the machine and its software to such an extent that you can give the machine capabilities beyond the mundane, or that your skills are such that you can resolve problems that others cannot completely understand.

BTW, thanks for the links. Incidentally, I started on the software side of things by programming self test diagnotics into ROM for circuit cards. All this was done in assembly of course, just not Intel assembly. And of course there was no such thing as Windows. So while the learning curve is long (including the Win32 API) I do at least have the basics.

dcow

The day i wrote that i had been up for 48 hours straight and i where generally a little pissed off about some things. Anyhow.. I know what this board is about. However, learning assembly just because you want to hack/reverse engineer is usually not a good starting point.

In my experience people who start in that direction doesnt come very far in the end of things. I started out with Basic and then Visual Basic before i turned to Assembly. The reason i started was because the basic language was to simplistic and i didnt like C either. Now ive been programming in Assembly for 3 years and my love for this language grows each day.

Assembly isnt really that hard to learn if you got the right head for it. But that depends on whats inside it. I wish you good luck in the world of assembly. Maybe you'll need it maybe you wont.

greets, nulli

Thanks Nulli,

things are going along with assy. I registered over at masm forum which looked like a good place. I'm using HLA and Ollydebug to get started. What I want to do is to use Kaspersky's book on Hacker Dissassembling to make the link to HLL's With practice and knowledge of Win32 API I should be able to get along pretty well in figuring out how Win and IE interact to run Ora Fin Apps which is my end goal.

Later

dcow don't use HLA, search around here or on the net and you will see why, or even alternatively, ask at the masm forum.

It is a basic question.
I know latest version masm is v8.x, and can get it from some sites.
Is there any relation with M$? Masm V6.x was distributed with DDK from M$.

Dcow, I also come from unix backround. I've done assembly with nasm/gdb, mostly for shellcodes, injection libraries and such.

I've just begun doing some windows stuff. The assembly is of course the same, but the way to access the system is different. For example in Unix the system calls are set in stone, where as in windows you have to use api calls thru dlls.

I would say Art of assembly (16bit) is a good way to learn assembler. The 32bit version uses HLA which isnt bad, bad MASM still rocks.

Perhaps, try to find another smaler book about 16bit Assembly and the jump to Icylions tutorials for win32asm. It worked best for me.