The book contains the full transcript of Software Diagnostics Services training. Learn disassembly, execution history reconstruction, and binary reversing techniques for better software diagnostics, troubleshooting, debugging, memory forensics, vulnerability and malware analysis on x64 and ARM64 Linux platforms. The course uses a unique and innovative pattern language approach to speed up the learning curve. The training consists of practical step-by-step, hands-on exercises using GDB and Linux core memory dumps. Covered more than 25 ADDR patterns originally introduced for the x64 Windows platform, and many concepts are illustrated with Memory Cell Diagrams. The prerequisites for this training are working knowledge of C and C++ programming languages. Operating system internals and assembly language concepts are explained when necessary. The primary audience for this training is software technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to go deeper in their analysis of abnormal software structure and behavior. The course is also useful for software engineers, quality assurance and software maintenance engineers who debug software running on diverse cloud and endpoint computer environments, SRE and DevSecOps, security and vulnerability researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts who have never used GDB for analysis of computer memory. The book also features ADDR pattern descriptions summarized after each exercise.
Author Biography:
Dmitry Vostokov is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, educator, scientist, and author. He is the founder of pattern-oriented software diagnostics, forensics and prognostics discipline, and Software Diagnostics Institute. Vostokov has also authored more than 50 books on software diagnostics, anomaly detection and analysis, software and memory forensics, root cause analysis and problem solving, memory dump analysis, debugging, software trace and log analysis, reverse engineering, and malware analysis. He has more than 25 years of experience in software architecture, design, development, and maintenance in a variety of industries including leadership, technical and people management roles. Dmitry also founded Syndromatix, Anolog.io, BriteTrace, DiaThings, Logtellect, OpenTask Iterative and Incremental Publishing, and Software Diagnostics Technology and Services (former Memory Dump Analysis Services) and Software Prognostics. In his spare time, he presents various topics on Debugging TV and explores Software Narratology, its further development as Narratology of Things and Diagnostics of Things (DoT), Software Pathology, and Quantum Software Diagnostics. His current areas of interest are theoretical software diagnostics and its mathematical and computer science foundations, application of formal logic, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining to diagnostics and anomaly detection, software diagnostics engineering and diagnostics-driven development, diagnostics workflow and interaction. Recent interest areas also include cloud native computing, security, automation, functional programming, and applications of category theory to software development and big data.
