Just finished learning 'basics' of reverse engineering. How to proceed further?

Question

Hello,

I cannot say I finished learning reverse engineering because its a skill that improves with practice. Basically, I now know how to reverse engineer things. I followed the book "Reversing: Secrets of reverse engineering". I did some hands on practice.

I know there are http://www.crackmes.de/ & http://www.reversing.be/ for practice. Nice, I've got a new hobby now. But thats it? Is this the end to it?

I want to do something productive. What can I do?

EDIT: I forgot to ask one thing. I reverse engineered couple of NTAPI functions by disassembling it using PEBrowse Professional. Figuring out the data structures involved lot of work and it was very time consuming. Are there any other ways to do this? because, if this is the only way then writing "Windows NT-2000 Native API Reference (by Gary Nebbett)" must take ages.

PS: Thank you StackOverflow.com! It just took my knowledge and skills to next level in few months.

Answer 1

Practice. Pick random programs and find/inject easter eggs. Practice. Take your favorite game and tear apart the resource and savefile formats. Practice.

Oh, and document everything.

Answer 2

AFAIK there's more than one book about this subject, and they also don't cover all the possibilities - allot of things about this domain is simply not written :).

I think something really productive would be to contribute to one of the open source libraries that help protect and prevent reverse engineering in applications.

If you would like something "less productive" but still "wanted by users" you will find for sure many many sites that ask for "patches, KGs and the like" for various very desired software :).

Answer 3

Try and get some popular games working on Wine, you'll learn tons from that, and do everyone a favor :)

Answer 4

Using this skill for debugging/security is also common, I'd recommend a couple sites.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/

http://www.reversemode.com/

Enjoy, Infro