Ole André Vadla Ravnås - Frida: The engineering behind the reverse-engineering

Ole André Vadla Ravnås explains the operating system APIs and binary rewriting techniques used to build the Frida instrumentation toolkit.

Ever wondered how to build your own debugger? Did you complete that assembly tutorial as a teenager, but never found any real life use for low-level programming? Need to learn more scary-sounding technical jargon to crank up your pay grade? If you answered "yes" to zero or more of the above, you might be interested in what we have to offer. In this talk, we dive into the engineering principles behind Frida, a multi-platform scriptable dynamic binary instrumentation toolkit. We explain the basics of operating system processes, together with the relevant native OS APIs. We show how to use these APIs to probe state (memory, registers, threads) of a target process, and how to inject your own code into the process. If time allows, we'll show how Frida performs its dynamic instrumentation by rewriting binary code, in memory, while the target process is running.