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Red tradecraft
Binary formats
  • Privacy greenhouse
  • Defence blues
  • Purple crossroads
  • Indigo observatory
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Initializing search
    • An adversary mind map, one of many
      • Footing
      • What is there
      • Findings
      • Mapping
      • Turning access into position
        • Distinguishing interaction from capability
        • Spending capabilities for lateral movement
        • Operational reach and positional value
        • Getting past the login page
        • What honours what
        • Getting the lid off
        • Getting something of one’s own to run
        • Overflowing the bin on purpose
        • Crypto-attacks
        • Reverse engineering
          • Binary formats
            • Anatomy of binaries
            • Executable and Linkable Format (ELF)
            • Portable Executable (PE) format
            • Flat and raw binary formats
            • uBoot and uImage format
          • Binary formats
            • Anatomy of binaries
            • Executable and Linkable Format (ELF)
            • Portable Executable (PE) format
            • Flat and raw binary formats
            • uBoot and uImage format
          • Cracking nuts
          • Runbooks
          • Memory analysis
          • Virtual function reverse engineering tool
          • Analysing Anti-Reverse engineering tricks
          • PE/ELF header parser
          • Dynamic analysis for API monitoring
          • crackmes.one
        • Slipping through the cracks
        • The art of becoming part of the furniture
      • What changed, and what it cost
      • Revising, then pricing
      • Converting position into value
      • Assessing, then deciding
    • The grounds
    • Ankh-Morpork: the city leaves a footprint
    • Fungolia earthworks
    • Unseen University Power & Light Co.
    • The Scarlet Semaphore
    • TryHackMe rooms
    • Root-Me challenges
    • RIPE NCC Academy labs

    Binary formats¶

    Machine code reaches a processor as a binary file, built for one operating system on one hardware architecture and no other. The format that wraps it, its sections, its symbols, its entry point, is the first thing to read when taking it apart.

    The anatomy of binary formats and the binary life cycle.

    • Anatomy of binaries
    • Executable and Linkable Format (ELF)
    • Portable Executable (PE) format
    • Flat and raw binary formats
    • uBoot and uImage format
    2026-07-30 17:57
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