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SubjectRe: Backward disassembling (was: Re: 2.5.63 accesses below %esp)
At 1:16pm +0100 3/14/03, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
> > Why not? Disassemble from, say, EIP-16 and check whether you have
>> an instruction starting exactly at EIP. If no, repeat from EIP-15,
>> -14... You are guaranteed to succeed at EIP-0 ;)
>
>Disassembling must be started "much" earlier. From your example one
>could get the impression you want to get the instruction right before
>EIP. It's not possible to go back this way. For example if you want to
>disassemble 100 bytes before EIP you must start at EIP-100 and EIP-99
>and ... and EIP-100-max_instruction_length+1. Then you have the right
>one among them (well, 99.9% but let's don't be too pedantic).
>
>You also can't stop the above max_instruction_length iteration when
>the next instruction address matches EIP. You can have even
>max_instruction_length matches. But from the additional info (code
>after EIP, assembly "quality", available source where the crash
>happend) you could choose the right one.

Sounds similar to the problem of recognizing valid plaintext when
breaking a code.

As a practical matter (and in the context of this being a heuristic
debugging aid, not a guaranteed 100%-correct method), I wonder
whether one might not tend to sync up fairly quickly to the correct
code. For example, strings of one-byte instructions provide a
"landing zone" for disassembly leading up to them, and illegal
instructions provide clues that you're out of sync (not perfect, but
perhaps good enough).

I'm not in a position to do it right now, but I'd suggest trying it:
disassemble hunks of random code on random boundaries, and see how
many ways there tend to be of arriving at EIP+0, given enough of a
BEIP running start (for some definition of "enough").
--
/Jonathan Lundell.
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