Fravia's TOOLS OF OUR TRADE Messageboard ~ Moderated Re: wait a minute
Monday, 15-Feb-99 09:31:19

Sorry, I'm probably a bit confused myself :-)

So you have a target.
Your target calls all sort of API's, windows, files, register operations, you name them.
What I would like to have is a tool that gives me a printed flow chart of which 'areas' of my target are working. Say you use a target and never save anything, then the whole 'saving' area of the code will NOT be used... and yiou get a flow chart number one.
Now re-load same target and save like hell, save, save as, import, export, whatever, now OTHER completely different areas of your target will have been 'working' and you get flow-chart number two.

And so on and so on.
Of course you can get the same understanding of your target's behaviour trough a (slow and cumbersome) analysis of smartcheck's output, or through filemon + regmon + softice + dead listing + a lot of work... but I believe that such a tool as I descrived above would be very useful to let the cracker quickly go where is capabilities are needed - AVOIDING - useless analysis of parts of the code that are not even used at all.

Of course you'll tell me that a good reverser should know which parts are which and where to lay his eyes from the beginning. But I'm not a 'great' reverser and I think that such a flow-tracker (is it or is it not the correct word?) would be helpful for advanced reversers as well.

So I don't want so much opcodes but sequences of LOCATIONS (physical code locations) of my target being active in a given phase.

Once I have realised that -say- my target uses heavily its own source code between xxxx50AA and xxxx6FFF when telling me I cannot save with the demo version :-) I will enter heavily armed with sice and have a microscope look at those 2000 bytes...

Hope I was clear enough this time :-)
cu
Giglio

Giglio